Hey There,
Today we're going to look at two different ways to mirror disk on Solaris (both free - but distinguished from freeware in that they're distributed for use on Solaris' commercial and (often) proprietary filesystems and OS).
The old way, probably every Solaris Sysadmin knows backward and forward. Using the Solaris DiskSuite set of tools (meta-whathaveyou ;), which was, at one point, changed to Solaris Volume Manager (which introduced some feature enhancements, but not the kind I was expecting. The name Volume Manager has a direct connection in my brain to Veritas and the improvements weren't about coming closer to working seamlessly with that product).
The somewhat-new way (using the zpool command) won't work - to my knowledge - on any OS prior to Solaris 10, but with Solaris 8 and 9 reaching end of life in the not-too-distant future, every Solaris Sysadmin will have some measure of choice.
With that in mind let's take a look at a simple two disk mirror. We'll look at how to create one and review it in terms of ease-of-implementation and cost (insofar as work is considered expensive if it takes a long time... which leaves one to wonder why I'm not comparing the two methods in terms of time ;)
Both setups will assume that you've already installed your operating system, and all required packages, and that the only task before you is to create a mirror of your root disk and have it available for failover (which it should be by default)
The DiskSuite/VolumeManager Way:
1. Since you just installed your OS, you wouldn't need to check if your disks were mirrored. In the event that you're picking up where someone else left off (and it isn't blatantly obvious - I mean "as usual" ;), you can check the status of your mirror using the metastat command:
host # metastat -p
You'll get errors because nothing is set up. Cool :)
2. The first thing you'll want to do is to ensure that both disks have exactly the same partition table. The same-ness has to be "exact," as in down to the cylinder. If you're off even slightly, you could be causing yourself major headaches. Luckily, it's very easy to make your second (soon to be a mirror) layout exactly the same as your base OS disk. You actually have at least two options:
a. You can run format, select the disk you have the OS installed on, type label (if format tells you the disk isn't labeled), then select your second disk, type partition, type select and pick the number of the label of your original disk. A lot of times these labels will be very generic (especially if you just typed "y" when format asked you to label the disk or format already did it for you during install) and you may have more than one to choose from. It's simple enough to figure out which one is the right one though (as long as you remember your partition map from the original disk and have made is sufficiently different from the default 2 or 3 partition layout). Just choose select, pick one, then choose print. If you've got the right one, then type label. Otherwise, repeat until you've gone through all of your selections. One of them has to be it, unless you never labeled your primary disk.
b. You can use two command (fmthard and prtvtoc) and just get it over with:
host # prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2 |fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2
3. Then you'll want to mirror all of your "slices" (or partitions; whatever you want to call them. We'll assume you have 6 slices set up (s0, s1, s3, s4, s5 and s6) for use and slice 7 (s7) partitioned with about 5 Mb of space. You can probably get away with less. You just need to set this up for DiskSuite/VolumeManager to be able to keep track of itself.
Firstly, you'll need to initialize the minimum number of "databases," set up the mirror group and add the primary disk slices as the first mirrors in the mirror-set (even though, at this point, they're not mirroring anything, nor are they mirrors of anything ;) Note that it's considered best practice to not attach the secondary mirror slices to the mirror device, even though you can do it for some of your slices. You'll have to reboot to get root to work anyway, so you may as well do them all at once and be as efficient as is possible:
host # metadb -a -f /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s7
host # metadb -a /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s7
host # metainit -f d10 1 1 c0t0d0s0
host # metainit -f d20 1 1 c1t0d0d0
host # metainit -d0 -m d10
host # metainit -f d11 1 1 c0t0d0s1
host # metainit -f d21 1 1 c1t0d0d1
host # metainit -d1 -m d11
host # metainit -f d13 1 1 c0t0d0s3
host # metainit -f d23 1 1 c1t0d0d3
host # metainit -d3 -m d13
host # metainit -f d14 1 1 c0t0d0s4
host # metainit -f d24 1 1 c1t0d0d4
host # metainit -d4 -m d14
host # metainit -f d15 1 1 c0t0d0s5
host # metainit -f d25 1 1 c1t0d0d5
host # metainit -d5 -m d15
host # metainit -f d16 1 1 c0t0d0s6
host # metainit -f d26 1 1 c1t0d0d6
host # metainit -d6 -m d16
4. Now you'll run the "metaroot" command, which will add some lines to your /etc/system file and modify your /etc/vfstab to list the metadevice for your root slice, rather than the plain old slice (/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0, /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0):
host # metaroot
5. Then, you'll need to manually edit /etc/vfstab to replace all of the other slices' regular logical device entries with the new metadevice entries. You can use the root line (done for you) as an example. For instance, this line:/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s6 /users ufs 1 yes -
would need to be changed to:/dev/md/dsk/d6 /dev/md/rdsk/d6 /users ufs 1 yes -
and, once that's done you can reboot. If you didn't make any mistakes, everything will come up normally.
6. Once you're back up and logged in, you need to attach the secondary mirror slices. This is fairly simple and where the actual syncing up of the disk begins. Continuing from our example above, you'd just need to type:
host # metattach d0 d20
host # metattach d1 d21
host # metattach d3 d23
host # metattach d4 d24
host # metattach d5 d25
host # metattach d6 d26
The syncing work will go on in the background, and may take some time depending upon how large your hard drives and slices are. Note that, if you reboot during a sync, that sync will fail and it will start from 0% on reboot with the affected primary mirror slices remaining intact and the secondary mirror slices automatically resyncing. You can use the "metastat" command to check out the progress of your syncing slices.
And, oh yeah... I almost forgot this part of the post:
The Zpool way:
1. First you'll want to do exactly what you did with DiskSuite/VolumeManager (since both disks have to be exactly the same). We'll assume you're insanely practical, and will just use this command to make sure your disks are both formatted exactly the same (just like above):
host # prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2 |fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2
2. Now we'll need create a pool, add your disks to it (all slices as one) and mirror them:
host # zpool create mypool mirror c0t0d0 c1t0d0
3. Wait for the mirror to sync up all the slices. You can check the progress with "zpool status POOLNAME" - like:
host # zpool status mypool
And that's that. The choice is yours, unless you're still using Solaris 9 or older. This post isn't meant to condemn the SDS/SVM way. It works reliably and is really easy to script out (and when both of these methods are scripted out, they're just as easy to run and the only hassle the old way gets you is the forced reboot).
It's good to see that things are getting easier and more efficient. Although, hopefully, that won't make today's Sysadmins tomorrows bathroom attendants ;)
Cheers,
, Mike
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