Installing the Recommended Patch Cluster With Zones Parallel Patching

As promised on Friday, I’ve taken the plunge and tested applying the latest patch cluster to a fresh Solaris 10u5 installation running 10 zones using the new zones parallel patching feature.

To speed things up and to try and prevent any problems I performed the following steps:

1. Jumpstarted the OS (SUNWCuser cluster)
2. Applied patches 125555-04 and 119254-66 (gives us the parallel functionality)
3. Created a basic sparse-root zone without any networking
4. Cloned the zone 9 more times
5. Create an alternate BE using live upgrade so I had two identical boot environments

Once I had the machine setup, I booted into single user mode (so all zones will be in the “installed” state) and set off the first cluster installation using the default options (ie no parallel application).

I then rebooted into single user mode on the alternate boot environment, set num_proc to 10 and applied the patch cluster again.

How’s this for a significant difference in time:

num_proc=1

num_proc=10

This parallel patching is brilliant, pity we had to wait so long for it.