Overview of Large Volume Support in Solaris Volume Manager

Starting with the Solaris 9 4/03 release, Solaris Volume Manager supports storage devices and logical volumes greater than 1 terabyte (TB) on systems running a 64–bit kernel.

Use isainfo -v to determine if your system is running a 64–bit kernel. If the string “64–bit” appears, you are running a 64–bit kernel.

Solaris Volume Manager allows system administrators to do the following:

1. Create, modify, and delete logical volumes built on or from logical storage units (LUNs) greater than 1 TB in size.

2. Create, modify, and delete logical volumes that exceed 1 TB in size.

Support for large volumes is automatic—if a device greater than 1 TB is created, Solaris Volume Manager configures it appropriately and without user intervention.

Large Volume Support Limitations

Solaris Volume Manager only supports large volumes (>1 TB) on Solaris 9 4/03 or later when running a 64–bit kernel. Running a system with large volumes under 32–bit kernel on previous Solaris 9 releases will affect Solaris Volume Manager functionality. Specifically, note the following:

• If a system with large volumes is rebooted under a 32–bit Solaris 9 4/03 or later kernel, the large volumes will be visible through metastat output, but they cannot be accessed, modified or deleted, and no new large volumes can be created. Any volumes or file systems on a large volume in this situation will also be unavailable.

• If a system with large volumes is rebooted under a release of Solaris prior to Solaris 9 4/03, Solaris Volume Manager will not start. All large volumes must be removed before Solaris Volume Manager will run under another version of the Solaris Operating Environment.

• Solaris Volume Manager transactional volumes do not support large volumes. In all cases, UFS logging (see mount_ufs(1M)) provides better performance than transactional volumes, and UFS logging does support large volumes as well.

Do not create large volumes if you expect to run the Solaris Operating Environment with a 32–bit kernel or if you expect to use a version of the Solaris Operating Environment prior to Solaris 9 4/03.

Using Large Volumes

All Solaris Volume Manager commands work with large volumes. No syntax differences or special tasks are required to take advantage of the large volume support, so system administrators who are familiar with Solaris Volume Manager can immediately work with Solaris Volume Manager large volumes.

If you create large volumes, then later determine that you need to use Solaris Volume Manager under previous releases of Solaris or that you need to run under the 32–bit Solaris 9 4/03 or later kernel, you will need to remove the large volumes. Use the metaclear command under the 64–bit kernel to remove the large volumes from your Solaris Volume Manager configuration before rebooting under previous releases of Solaris or under a 32–bit kernel.