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Date: 06/03/2007
Date: 06/03/2007
Date: 06/03/2007
Date: 06/03/2007
Thursday, July 13. 2006
Solaris 10 Partitioning, RAID, and ZFS
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A few comments.
although it's increasingly common to join /usr and /, it doesn't cause any problems (or any work) to keep them separate. I've been building SunOS/Solaris systems for 15 years, and I always and still insist on separation.
I don't recall that partitions need to match exactly for metadisk mirroring, although you get optimal space usage if they do. Maybe this has changed more recently, though.
Your prtvtoc | fmthard approach is exactly the ideal way to match VTOCs in Solaris, but only works if the disks have the same capacity and cylinder count (which usually means being the same model). If that's not your situation you can still approximate by interactive partitioning in format(1M), but (as above) your partitions may not be exactly the same size, and some space may be lost.
Sun Volume Manager (formerly DiskSuite) is actually quite nice in many respects, although it does require a bit of zombie organ-cranking in the setup commands. But you can easily dash out shell loops for this if you take the right strategy with metadevice naming (for example, using d0-d7 to indicate mirrors for partitions 0-7, and d11 for stripe 1 on SCSI target 1, etc.) I've used DiskSuite to build a disk factory for churning out prebuilt system boot disks, for example. Just insert disk, metattach, sync, metadetach, unplug, repeat.
metadbs. You need a quorum (minimum 3) of replicas to operate, but you can install multiple replicas in a single partition. I typically put 3 replicas in slice 7 of each disk in my mirrored root volume set, so there are 6 replicas total, and my system remains sane if I pull one of the disks. Be sure not to mirror the metadb slice. :)
But all that aside, yeah: ZFS is really sweet. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Solaris partisan, but I'm excited to see ZFS becoming available for other platforms, too.
although it's increasingly common to join /usr and /, it doesn't cause any problems (or any work) to keep them separate. I've been building SunOS/Solaris systems for 15 years, and I always and still insist on separation.
I don't recall that partitions need to match exactly for metadisk mirroring, although you get optimal space usage if they do. Maybe this has changed more recently, though.
Your prtvtoc | fmthard approach is exactly the ideal way to match VTOCs in Solaris, but only works if the disks have the same capacity and cylinder count (which usually means being the same model). If that's not your situation you can still approximate by interactive partitioning in format(1M), but (as above) your partitions may not be exactly the same size, and some space may be lost.
Sun Volume Manager (formerly DiskSuite) is actually quite nice in many respects, although it does require a bit of zombie organ-cranking in the setup commands. But you can easily dash out shell loops for this if you take the right strategy with metadevice naming (for example, using d0-d7 to indicate mirrors for partitions 0-7, and d11 for stripe 1 on SCSI target 1, etc.) I've used DiskSuite to build a disk factory for churning out prebuilt system boot disks, for example. Just insert disk, metattach, sync, metadetach, unplug, repeat.
metadbs. You need a quorum (minimum 3) of replicas to operate, but you can install multiple replicas in a single partition. I typically put 3 replicas in slice 7 of each disk in my mirrored root volume set, so there are 6 replicas total, and my system remains sane if I pull one of the disks. Be sure not to mirror the metadb slice. :)
But all that aside, yeah: ZFS is really sweet. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Solaris partisan, but I'm excited to see ZFS becoming available for other platforms, too.
[same coward here]
Oh, and thanks for the writeup. I like reading howtos.
Oh, and thanks for the writeup. I like reading howtos.
To make an AMD system (in my case a Sun Fire X2100M2) bootable I also did the following steps;
To /etc/system I added these lines:
set md:mirrored_root_flag=1
set md_mirror:md_resync_bufsz = 2048
To /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc:
setprop altbootpath '/pci@0,0/pci-ide@5/ide@1/cmdk@0,0:a'
Make the partitions on both discs active (format->fdisk).
To /etc/system I added these lines:
set md:mirrored_root_flag=1
set md_mirror:md_resync_bufsz = 2048
To /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc:
setprop altbootpath '/pci@0,0/pci-ide@5/ide@1/cmdk@0,0:a'
Make the partitions on both discs active (format->fdisk).
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