Setup Disk Mirroring on Solaris 8

Question

I need to know of how to setup Disk Mirroring on Solaris 8 on my SUN E250/E280
Which manual collection, provide a step by step procedure to do it. Thanks.

Answer 1

I assuming you're going to be using Sun disc management software ( DiskSuite) and not something like Veritas volume manager.
There are some Sun infodocs on the sunsolve site ( sunsolve.sun.co.uk is the one I use ) that contain good step by step guides on how to mirror discs using Solstice Disksuite. Type in "disksuite faq" as keywords to search.
Disksuite 4.2.1 comes with Solaris 8 ( this is the recommended version of DiskSuite you use with 8), but you need to make sure it was included as a package to install when the server was originally built). If it hasn't been installed, put the Solaris 8 cd 2 of 2 and do a package add on the following path /cdrom/sol_8_1000_sparc_2/Solaris_8/EA/Products.
Pick disksuite and I generally add all the packages. You'll need to know the product a bit more if you want to pick and choose the components to install.
Once done, you'll need to reboot the server and then begin to configure the discs. To understand the various concepts with disksuite you will need to read the manuals.
I use the command line but there is a GUI tool supplied with the product called metatool to help you mirror your discs.
As a high level overview this is what you need to do:
Create a minimum of 3 state databases ( on a separate disc slice of about 5 megabytes in size, nothing else should use this slice )
The discs you want to mirror should have the same partition table to keep life simple.
I would create 6 databases, 3 on an individual slice.
Then create your mirror devices which represent the various partitions you want to mirror from the primary disk. Then create your metadevices and attach the first set of mirrors to them.
You need to issue a special command called metaroot to get the system to mount the root filesystem metadevice at boot time.
At this stage I would then make a backup of /etc/vfstab and then edit it to mount your metadevices instead of the normal disc devices.
I would then bounce the server to check it all works and the metadevices get mounted correctly.
Create your second set of mirror devices on the secondary disc and add them to the appropriate metadevice ( using metattach )
If the filesystems are very large it takes a few minutes for the disks to sync up, so don't bounce the server until this process has completed. You can run a check on disk synchronisation by doing metastat | grep sync
Finally I would put the output from the command metastat -p into the /etc/lvm/md.tab file at the very end with some appropriate comments.
This can seem a very onerous task at the beginning but once your clear on steps you need to run, the whole procedure is quite straightforware.