Mirroring Your Boot Disk Using Veritas On Sun Without Encapsulation

Hey There,

Today, we're going to take a look at a using Veritas to mirror your boot disks, without using encapsulation. There's raging debate about whether or not Veritas root disk encapsulation is bad (some folks are great with it because it takes care of everything, while some folks hate it because it's very hard to deal with when it doesn't take care of everything ;)

The following procedure was introduced quite a while ago by a pair of gentleman named Gene Trantham and John S. Howard in an article they wrote for Sun Blueprints Online (A site run by Sun that highlights best-practices for many, many things Solaris). I believe it's now simply referred to as the "Trantham/Howard Method."

Although I've used this method many times in my career, there's no point in re-writing the instructions (although I did, to a certain degree, to make them more concise and accessible). I did, however, want to have this information included on my blog, to complement (and complete) our earlier posts on patching your Veritas root disk, Veritas Volume Group setup, etc. The full document can be read here in the August 2000 Online Edition of Sun Blueprints.

So, without further ado, and, hopefully you'll find this helpful as well, the "Trantham/Howard Method" for mirroring boot disks using Veritas on Sun Solaris (somewhat modified and truncated):

Enjoy,

1. Install the basic Veritas Volume Manager Software.

2. Install any required Veritas licenses.

3. Use vxinstall to encapsulate the root disk c0t0d0 (Or whatever cxtxdx disk name accurately reflects your setup). Choose not to encapsulate the root disk and don't mirror it. For this post's sake, name it rootdisk Once the root disk is encapsulated, simply reboot and check "vxprint -ht" - You should note that only your rootdisk (and its Veritas name) is listed out.

4. Initialize the root mirror disk c0t1d0 (again, substitute with your own specific controller-target-disk name).

host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxdisksetup -i c0t1d0
host # vxdg adddisk rootmirror=c0t1d0

5. Manually attach the mirror plexes to the root volumes with "vxrootmir" (manually mirror the swapvol, usr and var volumes, if necessary, as well):

host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxrootmir rootmirror
host # vxassist mirror swapvol alloc=rootmirror
host # vxassist mirror usr alloc=rootmirror
host # vxassist mirror var alloc=rootmirror

While you wait for this to finish, you can check on the progress with the vxtask command.

6. Once your root disk is mirrored, disassociate the original plexes on c0t0d0, remove them, and remove the encapsulated rootdisk from the rootdg diskgroup:

host # vxplex dis rootvol-01 swapvol-01 var-01 usr-01
host # vxdg rmdisk rootdisk

Now your operating system is entirely running off of the c0t1d0 disk.
At this point, the operating system is based just on the initialized disk c0t1d0, which you can see by looking at the output of "vxprint -ht" again.

7. Now initialize, as opposed to encapsulating, c0t0d0:

host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxdisksetup -i c0t0d0
host # vxdg adddisk rootdisk=c0t0d0

8. Now, mirror everything from the rootmirror disk back to the rootdisk:

host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxrootmir rootdisk
host # vxassist mirror swapvol alloc=rootdisk
host # vxassist mirror var alloc=rootdisk
host # vxassist mirror usr alloc=rootdisk

Again, you can use the vxtask command to view the progress of this command, which may take some time to complete. Also, this process removes the "rootdisk-B0" subdisk. This is used by Veritas to protect the boot block, but isn't necessary when you're not encapsulating your disks.

9. Using the output of "vxprint -ht", create disk slices corresponding to the Veritas subdisks. The usage for vxmksdpart command is:

vxmksdpart [-f] [-g diskgroup] subdisk sliceno [tag flags]

You won't need to run through this for the root slice since vxrootmir has already done this for you. You will need to do this for the other slices, though. But, don't use vxmksdpart just yet.

10. On the "new" root disk, first create the slices for the partitions you're going to mirror:

host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxmksdpart rootdisk-02 1 0x03 0x01
host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxmksdpart rootmirror-02 1 0x03 0x01

and so on for each required partition (again, you can get this output from "vxprint -ht"). The "sliceno" part of the command syntax is very important here!

host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxmksdpart rootdisk-03 5 0x07 0x00
host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxmksdpart rootmirror-03 5 0x07 0x00
...

11. Among other things (like backing up /etc/vfstab, etc) be sure to capture the current disk partition information for both disks, before rebooting, using vxprtvtoc:

host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxprtvtoc -f /tmp/disk1 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2
host # /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxprtvtoc -f /tmp/disk2 /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s2
host # cat /tmp/disk1 /tmp/disk2 > /etc/vtoc

12. Update your system dump configuration to use the swap partition on the primary disk:

host # dumpadm -d /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1
Dump content: kernel pages
Dump device: /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 (swap)
Savecore directory: /var/crash/host
Savecore enabled: yes

13. In the OBP, be sure to setup both disks using devalias (name them disk and rootdisk, if you want, or whatever makes the most sense to you) and set your configuration to have the boot-device set up to make it easy for your system to fail over if the primary disk goes bad:

ok> setenv boot-device disk, rootdisk, net

14. Be sure to test booting from the OBP for both disk and rootdisk. Assuming that goes well, you're all set :)

, Mike