Starting with Solaris 10, Sun has introduced the Service Management Facilities (SMF), a collection of services (applications) that execute as a single process that starts at boot time and executes continuously while the system is up and running, servicing any requests received.

Prior to Solaris 10, all of the startup scripts were executed from the /etc/rc.d directories. These are no longer applicable in this particular release of Solaris. In Solaris 10, everything has be done and managed by the SMF and started as part of the service instances recorded in the service configurations repository.

Therefore, the 4.1 VRTS packages have to be removed and reinstalled when upgrading to Solaris 10 from the previous releases, i.e. Solaris 6, 7, 8,  and 9. Failure to do so will make Veritas Volume Manager (vxconfigd) unable to start automatically, as the installation of the packages will create specific services upon startup.

These are some of the services which the VRTS installation will include as part of the SMF:

online         18:24:15 svc:/system/vxvm/vxvm-reconfig:default
online         18:24:20 svc:/system/vxvm/vxvm-startup1:default
online         18:24:22 svc:/system/vxvm/vxvm-startup2:default
online         18:24:25 svc:/system/vxvm/vxvm-sysboot:default
online         18:24:28 svc:/system/vxfs/vxfsldlic:default
online         18:24:42 svc:/system/vxvm/vxvm-recover:default

As a result, prior to step 11 (ie: prior to running upgrade_finish script), in the Veritas Storage Foundation (tm)  4.1 Installation Guide, on page 116 (Upgrading Solaris Only),  all of the 4.1 VRTS packages need to be removed first and then reinstalled.