soft vs hard partitions

[cndcadams]

I am looking to advance knowledge and understanding on soft vs hard partitions. I noticed in a recent post thread60-1213665 that the company is using soft partitions with Disk Suite.

I am researching the topic myself but know that there are people in here with real life experiences who can add valuable information.

Some questions I have are;

Why would someone use soft partitions and what are the benefits?

How much is soft partitioning used? ( Do you guys and ladies implement it yourselves?)

Any links to good docs would be helpful.

Thanks

CA

 

[kHz]

I would say for example you have one 72 GB disk. You are limited to 7 slices. What if you used 5 slices of 1 GB each, then you have 2 slices remaining and need to use 70 GB between them. Not likely you need one filesystem that much space. With a soft partition you can have up to (8192 I think) partitions.

Here are some examples of soft partitions:
# metainit d100 1 1 c0t2d0s0
# metainit d101 -p d100 10g
# metainit d102 -p d100 500m

To create a RAID 0 (stripe) of two slices:
# metainit d100 1 2 c0t0d0s7 c0t2d0s7
# metainit d101 -p d100 100m
# metainit d102 -p d100 20g

To create a RAID 0 (concatenation) of 4 slices:
# metainit d100 4 1 c0t0d0s2 1 c0t1d0s2 1 c0t2d0s2 c0t4d0s2
# metainit d101 -p d100 50g
# metainit d102 -p d100 20g

To create a RAID 1 (two-way mirror):
# metainit d101 1 1 c0t0d0s2
# metainit d102 1 1 c0t1d0s2
# metainit d100 -m d101
# metattach d100 d102
# metainit d151 -p d100 10g
# metainit d152 -p d100 5g

To create a RAID 5 volume of three slices:
# metainit d45 -r c0t0d0s2 c0t2d0s2 c1t0d0s2
# metainit d46 -p d45 10g
# metainit d47 -p d45 10g

I am using soft partitions on my boot/install server which works great if I need to add more space because I am adding a new image, for example, when Solaris 10 1/06 came out. Or if I need to add space to my /jumpstart directory where I add patches. I can add 10MB or 1GB depending on my needs.