Veritas Volume Manager questions 4

[dandan123]

I'm going through the Veritas Volume manager 3.5 documentation to understand how to administer it.

Unfortunately I do not have access to system with Veritas and a disk array to play around with.

I have a bunch of questions to ask and if any of you who have experience with Veritas would answer I would appreciate it.

As an example, lets say you attach a disk array with 16 drives in it.

The first step would be to load the package which comes with it so the drives are recognized right ?

Now once you load the package ( driver or whatever it's called) how do these sixteen drives appear on Solairs ? Will they all have cxtydz numbers ?

Do we have to create slices on these drives like we would normally do on built in drives ?

TIA

 

[dandan123]

What version of VxVM are you using ?

In your example you are assigning one VM Disk to one physical disk (VM Disk = mydisk01 and physical disk = cNtNdN) right ?

So does this mean one VM disk is always assigned to one physical disk ? This is what I was trying to ask in my previous post.

From what I have been reading in the veritas 3.5 documentation, this is what is normally done -

Create VM disks from physical disks
Creat Sub disks on VM Disks
Create Plexes using Sub Disks, when creating a plex define if it is concat, mirror, stripe or raid5.
Create Volumes using a plex.

 

[dandan123]

Annihillanic,

For the veritas file system, don't you have to load software other than what is contained in Veritas Volume Manager ? Also don't you need a separate license key for vfs ?

 

[Annihilannic]

dandan123,

The commands I listed should work fine for VxVM 3.2 through 4.0 on various platforms (I use mostly Solaris and Linux).

Yes, I always assign one physical disk to one VM disk. There may be ways to assign multiple disks to a disk (I know that you can assign part of a disk to VM control, but it is very rarely used like that).

The part of the documentation you are referring to is describing how to build volumes the hard way (i.e. using vxmake). Handy to know for academic reasons, but vxassist is by far the simplest method as it creates the subdisks, plexes and volume for you.

VxFS is available separately, but most installations I have encountered use the "Veritas Foundation Suite" which includes both Volume Manager and Filesystem.

Annihilannic.

 

[dandan123]

Thanks Annihilanic. Yes I was referring to the vxmake method. I agree vxassist is a lot easier to use.

 

[dandan123]

This link explains how to configure a A1000 using RM 6.22.

http://www.geocities.com/arndike/raid_manager_6_and_A1000.html

The author creates LUNS 0 - 6.

Now my question -

After a reboot how do these LUNS show up on Solaris ? Do they appear as c1todosx where x = 0-6 ?

 

[daFranze]

when the OS is operating the RM6.22 will provide the luns as if they where single HDs

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years in the domain of the OS, Backup and Storage

 

[dandan123]

Hello daFranze,

Thanks for your response. Do you think you could go through the link I provided and let me know the exact device name for the LUNS that would show up under format ?

Thanks.

 

[daFranze]

well, it's very long time ago I worked with RM6.22 but afai remember a command like

# raidutil -c c1t0d0 -n 0 -l 1+0 -s 8617 -g 10,20

will generate a c1t0d0s0; if the lun is not mountet run a eg.
# newfs /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0
to use it

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years in the domain of the OS, Backup and Storage