Global Devices

The Sun Cluster software uses global devices to provide cluster-wide, highly available access to any device in a cluster, from any node, without regard to where the device is physically attached. In general, if a node fails while providing access to a global device, the Sun Cluster software automatically discovers another path to the device. The Sun Cluster software then redirects the access to that path. Sun Cluster global devices include disks, CD-ROMs, and tapes. However, the only multiported global devices that Sun Cluster software supports are disks. Consequently, CD-ROM and tape devices are not currently highly available devices. The local disks on each server are also not multiported, and thus are not highly available devices.

The cluster automatically assigns unique IDs to each disk, CD-ROM, and tape device in the cluster. This assignment enables consistent access to each device from any node in the cluster. The global device namespace is held in the /dev/global directory. See Global Namespace for more information.

Multiported global devices provide more than one path to a device. Because multihost disks are part of a device group that is hosted by more than one Solaris host, the multihost disks are made highly available.

Device IDs and DID Pseudo Driver

The Sun Cluster software manages shared devices through a construct known as the DID pseudo 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 pseudo driver is an integral part of the shared device access feature of the cluster. The DID driver probes all nodes of the cluster and builds a list of unique devices, assigns each device a unique major and a minor number that are consistent on all nodes of the cluster. Access to shared devices is performed by using the normalized DID logical name, instead of the traditional Solaris logical name, such as c0t0d0 for a disk.

This approach ensures that any application that accesses disks (such as a volume manager or applications that use raw devices) 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 Solaris host to Solaris host, thus changing the Solaris device naming conventions as well. For example, Host1 might identify a multihost disk as c1t2d0, and Host2 might identify the same disk completely differently, as c3t2d0. The DID framework assigns a common (normalized) logical name, such as d10, that the hosts use instead, giving each host a consistent mapping to the multihost disk.

You update and administer device IDs with the cldevice command. See the cldevice(1CL) man page.