Live Upgrade Now Available on Hosted Sun Solaris Servers

CIT has recently started implementing Live Upgrade on hosted Sun Solaris servers provided through our Unix Hosting Services. This allows system administrators to apply operating systems patches or perform an operating system upgrade with minimal downtime and disruption to the system.

How it works

To enable the live upgrade feature, the system is set up with a duplicate operating environment. Before patching, the active environment is duplicated, and the patching or upgrade is performed on the inactive copy of the operating system environment. Using this method, the updates can be done at any time without affecting running applications, which means they have no impact on normal system operations. A system reboot is all that is needed to have the new environment become active; when the system is rebooted, the updated/patched version becomes the current boot environment.

Live Upgrade benefits

Shortened outage time: Patching with Live Upgrade lowers the system’s downtime considerably. A patch or upgrade done without Live Upgrade could involve an outage of two to six hours. When patching with Live Upgrade, on the other hand, the outage is usually limited to a single reboot—10 to 20 minutes depending on the type of hardware.

For example, in the past four weeks it was necessary to have a few patching outages on hosted servers. The ones done without Live Upgrade required 191 and 201 minutes of downtime respectively, while the ones using Live Upgrade lasted less than 15 minutes (14 and 12 minutes, specifically), thereby reducing server downtime by at least 177 minutes, or almost 3 hours.

Minimal application outages and easy restore of prior versions: Live Upgrade’s use of a duplicate operating environment also ensures that, if problems do occur with a patch or upgrade, the previous version of the OS is still available. Thus, the fallback to the previous version can easily be completed by rebooting back to that environment.

Unix Hosting Services

CIT’s Unix Hosting Services offer centrally supported, dedicated, shared, and virtual Unix servers in a fully managed, 24x7 hosted environment. Our services include managed storage and backup, SSL certificates, network security architectures, application firewalls, load balancers, central web and database services in shared and dedicated configurations, and disaster recovery offerings. We provide a secure, SAS 70 audited environment with high availability configurations which includes patching, monitoring, and a dedicated customer coordinator.

More information

For more information about running your applications on CIT’s hosted Sun Solaris servers or if you have questions about Live Upgrade, contact the NIH Help Desk at http://ithelpdesk.nih.gov/support, or by phone at 301-496-4357 (6-HELP) (local), 866-319-4357 (toll free), or 301-496-8294 (TTY).

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