Re: Solaris device tree question

[chuck <chuck@Yerkes.com>]

Quoting Kerry Boomsliter (kerry@com21.com):
> Geoff Halprin wrote:
> > 
> > Q3. Any other techniques or advice?
> 
> Veritas.  Unlike DiskSuites, Veritas writes enough meta-data on each
> disk under it's control to find them no matter where they end up after a
> reconfig reboot.  

Or use an external RAID box and take the OS out of the effort
of doing the work of mirroring.  Then, when you move a disk
array, the admin needn't worry about making sure the config
files are set up *just*so*.

But if you still need software RAID, Veritas has a more mature
product.

The device remapping issue can be a nightmare in Solaris and
there's not a lot you can do short of booting Linux.  There's
nothing like throwing a new SCSI card into a machine and spending
the next 4 hours trying to recover from that.

> Many years ago I had several servers running large, multiple volumes
> under DiskSuites and saw Sun's new storage array (the original SSA). 
> They demoed it with Veritas to show that you could bring the system
> down, swap all the drives around in the SSA, boot -r, and be up and
> running all the raid volumes with no hands on the keyboard.  Of course,
> the RAID stripes were no longer optimally spread across all controllers
> in the SSA, but Veritas sure makes it easy to deal with any
> hardware/device changes.