Selecting Slices for State Database Replicas

Before selecting slices for state database replicas, consider the following guidelines and recommendations.

• You should create state database replicas on a dedicated slice of at least 4 Mbytes per replica. If necessary, you could create state database replicas on a slice that is to be used as part of a RAID-0 or RAID-1 volume. You must create the replicas before you add the slice to the volume.

• By default, the size of a state database replica is 4 Mbytes or 8192 disk blocks. Because your disk slices might not be that small, you can resize a slice to hold the state database replica. For information about resizing a slice, see “Administering Disks (Tasks)” in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

• You can create state database replicas on slices that are not in use. The part of a slice that is reserved for the state database replica should not be used for any other purpose.

• You cannot create state database replicas on existing file systems, or the root (/), /usr, and swap file systems. If necessary, you can create a new slice (provided a slice name is available) by allocating space from swap and then put state database replicas on that new slice.

• When a state database replica is placed on a slice that becomes part of a volume, the capacity of the volume is reduced by the space that is occupied by the replica or replicas. The space that is used by a replica is rounded up to the next cylinder boundary and this space is skipped by the volume.