Solaris 10 Installation - Disks missing, and Raid

Hey everyone. First, let me start by saying I'm primarily focused on linux boxes, and just happened to get pulled into building two T5220's. I'm not super educated on sun boxes.

Both T5220's have 8 146GB 15k SAS drives. Inside the service processor, I can run SHOW /SYS/HDD{0-7} and they all come back as being in a good state. But when I am in the installer, I only see 6 disks:
c1t0d0
c1t2d0
c1t4d0
c1t5d0
c1t6d0
c1t7d0

Any ideas about how to get the other 2 disks to be recognized?

Next, we need to have these disks put together in a Raid 10 configuration. Sadly the boxes aren't running a hardware raid controller, so I need to find a way to do that in software. Is UFS or ZFS better for doing this?

During the installer, do I just select all of the disks as the installation destination and solaris will do the configuration of the software raid for me? Any help would be very much appreciated. Most of the documentation I've found so far involves copying metadb things around, and doing that only leaves you with a Raid-1-esque sort of thing.

So you can't see c1t1d0 and c1t3d0 which just happen to be the second and fourth drives in the numbering sequence. This box has built in raid 1 controller (also can do raid 0) so it looks like c1t0d0 is mirrored to c1t1d0, and c1t2d0 is mirrored to c1t3d0 by the built-in hardware raid controller.

The command to configure all this stuff is "raidctl". Google for that.

The -S switch on raidctl will tell you the status/existing config.

If you boot into single user:

 
boot cdrom -s

you should be able to run that command. You can use the same command (see man pages) to break these mirrors after which your box should see all eight drives.

Don't think you'll get a raid 10 without fitting another hardware raid controller capable of the job.

1 Like

This looks like exactly what we were looking for - we can gladly use raid 1 instead of raid 10, these boxes are already overprovisioned compared to what we already have in the field. Thank you!

---------- Post updated at 03:41 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:42 PM ----------

Awesome! it turns out the LSI 1068E controller supports both raid 1E, and hot spares, so I was able to run the following:

raidctl -C "0.0.0 0.1.0 0.2.0 0.3.0 0.4.0 0.5.0 0.6.0" -r 1E 1
which creates a 7 disk Raid 1E

Followed by:
raidctl -a set -g 0.7.0 c1t0d0
which adds a hot spare.

Fantastic, thank you again!