Solaris 11.2 Beta
Updated:
Note : This page may contain outdated information and/or broken links; some of the formatting may be mangled due to the many different code-bases this site has been through in over 20 years; my opinions may have changed etc. etc.
Yesterday, Oracle announced Solaris 11.2 which includes a lot of interesting new features; not least of which is a full OpenStack distribution. There’s a lot of other improvements as well to all areas of the OS, from ZFS administration to the IPS system and Automated Installer. It also looks like Puppet is now included for systems management. All in all, a good release although it still pains me to see the “Oracle” logo slapped over everything, as well as the general lack of interest in anything Solaris-related these days. Hopefully this can re-kindle some excitement in what is after all, a ground-breaking and incredibly solid platform.
Anyway, one thing that was missing from the announcement was the simple set of steps needed to update a current 11.1 system to the new beta. The beta documentation assumes that 11.2 will be in a production IPS repository, so instead you’ll simply need to switch to the new Beta repository and set it as your “solaris” publisher, upgrade and reboot :
root@solaris:~# pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/beta solaris
root@solaris:~# pkg update --accept
A short download and update will then happen…
Packages to remove: 5
Packages to install: 94
Packages to update: 478
Mediators to change: 2
Create boot environment: Yes
Create backup boot environment: No
DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED
Completed 577/577 36168/36168 574.0/574.0 386k/s
PHASE ITEMS
Removing old actions 7121/7121
Installing new actions 26702/26702
Updating modified actions 26093/26283
Updating modified actions 26283/26283
Updating package state database Done
Updating package cache 483/483
Updating image state Done
Creating fast lookup database Done
A clone of solaris exists and has been updated and activated.
On the next boot the Boot Environment solaris-1 will be
mounted on '/'. Reboot when ready to switch to this updated BE.
Note the last part - one of the things I love about IPS and Solaris 11 is the creation of boot environments. I can see that my system is ready to reboot into Solaris 11.2 :
root@solaris:~# beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris N / 8.26M static 2014-04-28 10:41
solaris-1 R - 5.81G static 2014-04-30 11:52
So a quick reboot follows :
root@solaris:~# shutdown -i6 -g0 -y
And there it is…
Last login: Wed Apr 30 11:38:32 2014 from xxyyzz
Oracle Corporation SunOS 5.11 11.2 April 2014
mark@solaris:~$ uname -a
SunOS solaris 5.11 11.2 i86pc i386 i86pc
mark@solaris:~$ head /etc/release
Oracle Solaris 11.2 X86
Copyright (c) 1983, 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Assembled 23 April 2014
mark@solaris:~$
And, thanks to the magic of ZFS and Boot Environments, I can quickly switch back to 11.1 if there’s a problem :
mark@solaris:~$ beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris - - 9.12M static 2014-04-28 10:41
solaris-1 NR / 6.03G static 2014-04-30 11:52
mark@solaris:~$ pfexec beadm activate solaris
mark@solaris:~$ beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris R - 4.23G static 2014-04-28 10:41
solaris-1 N / 2.40G static 2014-04-30 11:52
mark@solaris:~$ pfexec init 6
Reboot, and I’m back to where I started. Much smoother than some upgrades I’ve had in the past :) Here’s to the full 11.2 release!