SPARC: How to Create a New Disk Group When Encapsulating Disks (VERITAS Volume Manager)

This procedure is only for encapsulating disks. If you are initializing disks, use the procedure SPARC: How to Create a New Disk Group When Initializing Disks (VERITAS Volume Manager).

You can make non-root disks into Sun Cluster disk device groups by encapsulating the disks as VxVM disk groups, then registering the disk groups as Sun Cluster disk device groups.

Disk encapsulation is only supported during initial creation of a VxVM disk group. After a VxVM disk group is created and registered as a Sun Cluster disk device group, only disks which can be initialized should be added to the disk group.

If you use VxVM to set up shared disk groups for Oracle Parallel Server or Oracle Real Application Clusters, use the cluster functionality of VxVM as described in the VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator's Reference Guide.

1. Become superuser on any node of the cluster.

2. If the disk being encapsulated has file system entries in the /etc/vfstab file, make sure that the mount at boot option is set to no.

   Set back to yes once the disk is encapsulated and registered as a Sun Cluster disk device group.

3. Encapsulate the disks.

   Use vxdiskadm menus or the graphical user interface to encapsulate the disks. VxVM requires two free partitions as well as unassigned cylinders at the beginning or the end of the disk. Slice two must also be set to the entire disk. See the vxdiskadm man page for more information.

4. Shut down and restart the node.

   The scswitch(1M) command switches all resource groups and device groups from the primary node to the next preferred node. Use shutdown to shut down and restart the node.

   # scswitch -S -h node[,...] # shutdown -g0 -y -i6

5. If necessary, switch all resource groups and device groups back to the original node.

   If the resource groups and device groups were initially configured to fail back to the primary node, this step is not necessary.

   # scswitch -z -D disk-device-group -h node[,...] # scswitch -z -g resource-group -h node[,...]

6. Register the VxVM disk group as a Sun Cluster disk device group.

   See SPARC: How to Register a Disk Group as a Disk Device Group (VERITAS Volume Manager).

   Do not register the Oracle Parallel Server or Oracle Real Application Clusters shared disk groups with the cluster framework.