need help mirroring new SSA drives

[WiccaChic]

Hello all. I just installed one full drawer of SSA drives and I would like to mirror them but dont know how. Can someone give me a "mirroring ssa for dummies" crash course?

Basically I will need to mirror the drives in the single drawer to each other - I know thats creating sort of a single point of failure if the drawer goes out, but I couldnt afford to drawers.

Thanks in advance.

 

[hdberger]

Hello,

you have just to use the LVM to create LV's and mirror them with smit or with mklvcopy. Probalbly it is possible to use the SSA Adapter (if it is a RAID Adater) to use raid1, but this is not recommended because nobody is doing it like this.
Put all you disks in a VG. Then, if you craete a filesystem with smit fs, you will get a lv00 or lv01,..... you will see this after mounting the new filesystem with the df command. Then you can check with lslv -l lv00 (or like this), where the lv is located. Then you can deside where (f.e. hdisk10) to have the copy. Use "mklvcopy lv00 2 hdisk10" to copy it. Then you have to sync the data (syncvg -p hdisk10) an you are save.

bye HD

 

[WiccaChic]

Thanks for the pointers hdberger!

 

[bi]

If you have an SSA adaptor with the fast write feature, I would recommend doing the mirroring at the SSA disk level, not the LVM level. I don't agree that "nobody is doing it like this." Using SSA disks as ordinary jbods is a waste of money on resources. If you use the disk as an ordinary system disk, you won't have the fast write feature, for example.

You should have gotten a manual that explains how to create a RAID1 (or 10 or 5) disk array. I recommend using smitty to guide you through making the arrays. (The commands for SSA disks start under "Devices".) Also, check redbooks.ibm.com for info on using SSA disks in your environment.