Help with HDD Mirroring

UNIX Solaris
1

Hi All

Please can I have some help/advice.
I am fairly new to unix so any help will be useful.

I need to perform HDD Mirroring on a Sun Fire V245 Server running Solaris 10 OS.
The system is already up and running and has the partitions and slices already.

Is it possible to perform the Mirroring on a system that is already running or do you have to do this on installation???

Best Regards
Pluto

2

You can create the root mirror on the running system. what kind of help do you need

please find the link where in you can get the details for SVM

SPARC: How to Create a RAID-1 Volume From the root (/) File System (Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide) - Sun Microsystems

3

Here's a straight forward site I used to mirror systems:

Mirroring the operating system

HTH

4

Can the mirroring be done on a system that already has information in the partitions.

Also on many of these sites they say put the Metadb in slice 7, will I need to create this slice?

5

Yes you can do the mirroring, however the other disk which you can use for mirror has to have the same disk layout. The best option is using the fmthard with prtvtoc to copy the VTOC from primary disk to secondary.

Yes its always suggested to keep the metadb on separate partition as its very important for SVM functioning, however its not an compilation you can keep the meta data on the slice which you will be suing for volume

6

Great advice so far guys, you are giving me a good understanding, I really appreciate it.

Also, the server has 4 HDD.

format

Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:

   0. c1t0d0 <SUN72G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 424>

      /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@a/pci@0/pci@8/scsi@1/sd@0,0

   1. c1t1d0 <SUN72G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 424>

      /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@a/pci@0/pci@8/scsi@1/sd@1,0

   2. c1t2d0 <SUN72G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 424>

      /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@a/pci@0/pci@8/scsi@1/sd@2,0

   3. c1t3d0 <SUN72G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 424>

      /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@a/pci@0/pci@8/scsi@1/sd@3,0

I will need to Mirror 0 and 2 ... and Mirror 1 and 3....

Futher info:

# df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 11G 7.0G 3.4G 68% /
/devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices
ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract
proc 0K 0K 0K 0% /proc
mnttab 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 15G 1.1M 15G 1% /etc/svc/volatile
objfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/object

/platform/sun4u-us3/lib/libc_psr/libc_psr_hwcap1.so.1
11G 7.0G 3.4G 68% /platform/sun4u-us3/lib/libc_psr.so.1

/platform/sun4u-us3/lib/sparcv9/libc_psr/libc_psr_hwcap1.so.1
11G 7.0G 3.4G 68% /platform/sun4u-us3/lib/sparcv9/libc_psr.so.1

/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s5 5.8G 1.9G 3.8G 34% /var
swap 15G 16K 15G 1% /tmp
swap 15G 64K 15G 1% /var/run
/dev/dsk/c1t1d0s0 67G 35G 31G 54% /gsn
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3 49G 50M 48G 1% /export/home

I have read the websites and have a good understanding of how to do it.
I am just a bit cautious since this is my first time doing this procedure and thought it could only be done on installation.

From the info I have given now, it is possible right?
I cant get more info if you tell me what commands to do

Thanks a million experts!!

7

Your drives are the same size so that makes things easy. Also make sure that the partitions are EXACTLY the same size. (see the prtvtoc ... | fmthard .... commands)

HTH