Local and Multihost Disks

There are two sets of storage devices within a cluster: local disks and multihost disks. Local disks are directly connected to a single node and hold the Solaris operating environment for each node. Multihost disks are connected to more than one node and hold client application data and other files that need to be accessed from multiple nodes.

For more conceptual information on multihost disks, local disks, and global devices, see Sun Cluster 3.0 Concepts.

Removable Media

Removable media includes tape and CD-ROM drives. Tape and CD-ROM drives are local devices. This guide does not contain procedures on adding, removing, or replacing removable media as highly-available storage devices. Although tape and CD-ROM drives are global devices, tape and CD-ROM drives do not have more than one port and do not have multi-initiator firmware support. Dual-ported disks and multi-initiator firmware support enable devices to be highly available. Thus, this guide 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, add, remove, replace, and use tape and CD-ROM drives as you would in a non-cluster environment. For procedures on adding, removing, and replacing tape and CD-ROM drives, see the documentation that shipped with your hardware.