[OmniOS-discuss] Recommended way to keep Zones up to date?

[Philippe]

Hi,

<noob question>
What is the recommended way to update the packages in the global and non global zones? 
</noob question>

I have a bunch of vanilla OmniOS zones defined ala:

# zonecfg -z personal
# zonecfg:personal> create
# zonecfg:personal> set zonepath=/Zones/personal
# zonecfg:personal> set autoboot=true
# zonecfg:personal> add net
# zonecfg:personal:net> set address=X.X.X.X/Y
# zonecfg:personal:net> set physical=bge0
# zonecfg:personal:net> end

I used to just run 'pkg update' in the global zone and then in each of the non-global zones. Since it is cumbersome, and the non global zones would always complain about not being able to update the boot environment, I googled around and decided to try the 'zoneadm -z my-zone detach' / 'zoneadm -z my-zone attach -u' strategy described in http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-dev/updatesoftwarezones-450942.html#Upgrading. Not only it seemed non ideal to have to bring the zone offline, but once I detached it my zone would never attach again due to some incorporation problem that I could not troubleshoot due to my limited IPS understanding.

So my question is what is the best practice here? What should I have been doing all along (ideally without taking downtime)?

Thanks in advance,
- Philippe