While catching up on some of my favorite blogs, I came across a post pertaining to parallel zone patching by Jeff Victor. In his write up, Jeff discussed a couple of methods for decreasing the time it takes to patch a host with one more more zones. Of the methods listed, the “Zones Parallel patch” feature caught my eye:
“Sun has developed an enhancement to the Solaris patching tools which is intended to significantly decrease the elapsed time of patching. It is currently being tested at a small number of sites. After it’s released you can get the Zones Parallel Patching patch, described below. This solution decreases the elapsed time to patch a system. It can be combined with some of the solutions above, with varying benefits. For example, with Live Upgrade, parallel patching reduces the time to patch the ABE, but doesn’t reduce service downtime. Also, ZPP offers little benefit for the detach/attach-on-upgrade method. However, as a stand-alone method, ZPP offers significant reduction in elapsed time without changing your current patching process.”
It can take a looooooong time to patch hosts with multiple zones, so I can’t wait to get my hands on this!