Removable Media in a Sun Cluster Environment

Removable media include tape and CD-ROM drives, which are local devices. Sun Cluster 3.0-3.1 Hardware Administration Manual for Solaris OS does not contain procedures for adding, removing, or replacing removable media as highly available storage arrays. Although tape and CD-ROM drives are global devices, these drives do not have more than one port and do not have multi-initiator firmware support that would enable these devices as highly available. Thus, Sun Cluster 3.0-3.1 Hardware Administration Manual for Solaris OS focuses on disk drives as global devices.

Although tape and CD-ROM drives cannot be highly available at this time, in a cluster environment, you can access tape and CD-ROM drives that are not local to your system. All the various density extensions (such as h, b, l, n, and u) are mapped so that the tape drive can be accessed from any node in the cluster.

Install, remove, replace, and use tape and CD-ROM drives as you would in a noncluster environment. For procedures about how to install, remove, and replace tape and CD-ROM drives, see the documentation that shipped with your hardware.