what kind of mirroring strategy did I inherit?

[WiccaChic]

Hi all. In a pinch and suffering from a lack of experience. I inherited a rs6k that already had two drawers of ssa drives setup in it and I was assured by my boss (boss of the guy before me) that the mirror strategy for those drawers was setup with IBM's help, time tested and even failure tested in the past.

I should not have taken their word for it...had a disk drive fail last week and it definitly wasnt mirrored.

Now I am playing catchup. How do I look at each disk and determine if and how its mirrored? I say how, because as I understand it theres a number of ways. I suspect that the guys here before didnot do a simple one disk to one disk mirror, but instead mirrored at a more granular level maybe based on lv's. We use raw devices for our database and these appear to aix as lv's so that almost makes a little sense.

I am not looking for anyone to point me to the manuals, I already have them and definitions are not what I am asking for. I am looking for tips here, so the academic nose tweakers please go pick on someone else.

 

[bi]

lslv -m <lvname> will show you which disks a logical volume is on. If it is mirrored, there will be two columns of disks (or three, if there are three copies of the LV). I don't have enough experience with raw devices (ugh) to know if this will help you, but if raw devices are seen as LVs in AIX, it should.

You can use smitty to check the config of the SSA disks. Drill down from the Devices menu.

 

[screwloose]

Use ‘smitty ssaraid’ then menu item ‘List/Identify SSA Physical Disks’ then ‘List Disks in an SSA RAID Array’ will give you a list of arrays that are in your system
(hdisk2 261F401044E54CK system good 54.7GB raid_5). Select the array you want and you will get the physical disks:
(pdisk0 006094D4ECF400D member present 18.2GB Physical disk
pdisk1 0090D61298E300D member present 18.2GB Physical disk
pdisk2 0090D61312F600D member present 18.2GB Physical disk
pdisk3 0090D613B70100D member present 18.2GB Physical disk)

hdisk2 is the logical disk and the pdisks are the physical disks.

 

[WiccaChic]

thanks!