Is there an easy, safe way to move the system to RAID1 on sparc solaris 10?
(without reinstalling).
thanks.
The first question is what sort of RAID1 on you talking; hardware built-in (using raidctl command) , hardware add-in (using third party software) or software (using meta)?
What hardware is it?
Are you wanting to mirror the root filesystem or a data drive?
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I would prefer the first one (hardware built-in), but don't think its supported. Server is Sun Fire V125. There are several slices (single disk), I'd like to mirror them all if possible, or at least root.
its running posgresql server.
thanks.
Looking up the Sunfire V125 it appears that you have to resort to software mirroring (meta) because there is no built-in hardware RAID controller.
Therefore the first questions are:
Q: Are all the cylinders of the current disk allocated? Is there any unallocated space?
The SVM requires a very small slice to keep it's metadata on (typically circa 10MB) which also means...
Q: Are all slices allocated? For example is slice 7 not in use?
If you have a free slice but no cylinders it's possible that you can shrink one slice by a few cylinders in order that you can create your metadata slice.
Here's some reading material (one link is a thread on this great forum plus two others to complement) to give you the idea. Yes, you can do this without reinstallation.
[How To] Mirror Root Disk with Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) | UNIX Note
---------- Post updated at 04:33 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:42 AM ----------
What filesystem is used? UFS or ZFS?
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thanks.
there isn't any unallocated space.
slice 7 seems to be unmounted, it is 71232 sectors large.
slice 6 is empty, size about 40G, contains only 'lost+found'.
filesystem is UFS.
There is an unwritten convention that means people use slice 7 for the meta. The meta slice only needs to be circa 10MB but there is no maximum, you just waste the disk space.
If slice 6 only has lost+found on it and is not mounted either then it's just a new unused filesystem. So you could shrink slice 7 to, say, 20MB and increase slice 6 with all the space released from slice 7. That means editing the VTOC within 'format' after booting from cdrom into single user. Obviously, DON'T alter any of the production slices!!
Being professional we should do that immediately after the backup has been run in case anything goes wrong. The same applies to actually setting up the mirror; always backup first.
If you want to use slice 7 as it is you can. It just wastes a ton of space.
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I would maybe go a bit more modern and use ZFS... You can find some usefull stuff here:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/ggpdm/index.html
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