Device ID

The Sun Cluster software manages global devices through a construct that is known as the device ID (DID) driver. This driver is used to automatically assign unique IDs to every device in the cluster, including multihost disks, tape drives, and CD-ROMs.

The DID driver is an integral part of the global device access feature of the cluster. The DID driver probes all nodes of the cluster and builds a list of unique disk devices. The DID driver also assigns each device a unique major and minor number that is consistent on all nodes of the cluster. Access to the global devices is through the unique DID assigned by the DID driver instead of the traditional Solaris DIDs.

This approach ensures that any application accessing disks, such as Solaris Volume Manager or Sun Java System Directory Server, uses a consistent path across the cluster. This consistency is especially important for multihost disks, because the local major and minor numbers for each device can vary from node to node. These numbers can change the Solaris device naming conventions as well.