WebStart Flash and Veritas Volume Manager

Question

I would like to use WebStart Flash for backup of the system
disk. The goal is to be able to recover the system disk rapidly.
It works perfectly for systems without Veritas Volume
Manager on the system disk.
However, if Veritas Volume Manager is installed and used
for mirroring the root disk, the system is not able to boot using
WebStart Flash. This is probably because the "private region"
of the disk is not included in the flash archive.
Does anybody have a solution for this, or does any of
you successfully combine WebStart Flash and Veritas
Volume Manager?
I use Jumpstart and the install_type is configured to
flash_install.
The question was also asked in the newsgroup
comp.unix.solaris.
Rgds,
Henrik

Answer 1

For many reasons, today you cannot save the VxVM
private region information as an implicit part of a
flash archive. The procedure would likely be to
unencapsulate the root drive, create the flash archive,
then re-encapsulate the root drive. This is an ugly
procedure and may cause more pain than it is worth.
When a root disk is encapsulated, an entry is put
into the /etc/system file which says to use the VxVM
or SVM logical volume for the rootdev rather than
the actual device from which the system was originally
booted. When you create a flash archive, this modification
to the /etc/system is carried along. But, when you install
it on a new system which doesn't have VxVM properly
installed already (a chicken-and-the-egg problem)
then the change of the rootdev to the logical volume
will fail. The result is an unbootable system (without
using 'boot -a' and pointing to a different /etc/system
file like /dev/null).
The current recommended process is to use a prototype
system which does not have an encapsulated root
to create the flash archive.
VxVM also uses the ELM license manager which will
tie the VxVM runtime license to the hostid. This makes
moving flash archives with VxVM to other machines
impractical or difficult.
The long term solution would be to add logical volume
management support to the JumpStart infrastructure.
I'm not counting on this anytime soon :-(
-- richard