Multi-Owner Disk Sets

Starting with the Solaris 9 9/04 release, Solaris Volume Manager can manage storage in a Sun Cluster environment using multi-owner disk sets. Multi-owner disk sets allow multiple nodes in a cluster to share the ownership of disk sets and to simultaneously access the shared disks. All disks and volumes in a multi-owner disk set can be directly accessed by all the nodes in a cluster. Each multi-owner disk set contains a list of the nodes that have been added to the disk set. Consequently, each multi-owner disk set within a cluster configuration can have a different (and sometimes overlapping) set of nodes.

Each multi-owner disk set has a master node. The function of the master node is to manage and update the state database replica changes. Since there is a master node per disk set, multiple masters can exist simultaneously. There are two ways that the master is chosen. The first way is that a node becomes the master if it is the first node to add a disk to the disk set. The second way is when a master node panics and fails. The node with the lowest node id becomes the master node.

Multi-owner disk sets work with Sun Cluster and with applications such as Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. For information about compatible releases of Sun Cluster, see http://wwws.sun.com/software/cluster. For more information on Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster, see Chapter 4, Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster (Overview).