Problem with root disk mirror vxvm 4.1

[mrberry]

I have Veritas VM 4.1 running on Solaris. I have encapsulated the system boot disk and want to create an exact mirror copy.

My disk layout is

0 /
1 swap
2 <entire disk>
3 <vxvm private>
4 <vxvm public>
5 /var
6 /other
7 <unused>


I am using the technique described in Sun Blueprints: Boot Disk management:

vxdg –g rootdg adddisk rootmirror=cxtxdx
/etc/vx/bin/vxrootmir rootmirror
vxassist mirror swapvol rootmirror
vxassist mirror var rootmirror
vxassist mirror other rootmirror
etc/vx/bin/vxbootsetup rootmirror

The problem is when I check the disk with format is has transposed my /var and /other file systems so that /var is now on slice 6 and /other is on slice 5. So I no longer have an exact copy.


I thought that when you mirror with vxassist it picks the next free slice. But it seems to want to put /var on slice 6.

Admitedly the Blueprint I am using is old, but does anyone have a solution to this problem?

 

[dandan123]

The easiest way is to use the gui if you can - vea

I think it's found in /opt/VRTS/bin

 

[mrberry]

dandan123, thank you for your reply.

This solution will not work for me as I need to be to do this at the command line so that I can script it.

 

[cndcadams]

mrberry;

I ran into a similar issue as you are seeing where the altmirror partitions did not match the rootmirror partitions. I can't remeber if I ever got back to fixing that issue or not. I will check my test configuration tommorrow if I get a chance.

I will keep you posted. One thought is did you partition the secondary boot drive like your main boot before doing the mirroring?

I have used the vxdiskadm to do my mirroring not command line like you are but since you are scripting I understand. Do you have to do the vxassist commands when using vxrootmir? Can't you just specify the disk to go from and to? Will vxmirror accomplish things any easier?

Thanks

CA

 

[Annihilannic]

As far as I can recall VxVM has always done this when mirroring root disks. There is no real harm in having the partitions in different places on the second mirror, so unless you have very good reasons to change that I would just let it do what it wants.

The reason is that normally VxVM configures a disk it puts the private region at the beginning of the disk to store it's configuration database. However when you initially install VxVM and encapsulate your root disk the beginning of the disk is usually already occupied by the root FS or swap or something, so it has to put the private region at the end of the disk. But when you go to mirror the root disk it initialises the new disk using it's "ideal" configuration of a private region at the beginning, so the disk layout is immediately different to the original.

Annihilannic.

 

[mrberry]

Thank you all for your replies, but I think I have a solution to this.

You could use vxmksdpart which allows you to specify a particular partition to put each Solaris partition back on the disk individually, but I found an easier solution that works for me using vxbootsetup.

I had been using vxbootsetup against the particular disk I wanted to put the partitons back on to. When I used VEA to mirror the disks it put the partitions back in the correct place, so I checked the VEA command logs and found that it was using vxbootsetup against the rootdg disk group and not against any particular disk. I ran the same process manually and it worked.