When working with disk sets, consider the following guidelines:
Solaris Volume Manager must be configured on each host that will be connected to the disk set.
Each host must have its local state database set up before you can create disk sets.
To create and work with a disk set in a clustering environment, root must be a member of Group 14 on all hosts, or the /.rhosts file on each host must contain an entry for the other host names associated with the disk set.
To perform maintenance on a disk set, a host must be the owner of the disk set or have reserved the disk set. A host takes implicit ownership of the disk set by putting the first disk into the disk set.
You cannot add a disk to a disk set that is in use for a file system, database or any other application. Before you add a disk, make sure that it is not currently being used.
Do not add to a disk set a disk containing existing data that you want to preserve. The process of adding the disk to the disk set repartitions the disk and destroys existing data.
The default total number of disk sets permitted on a system is 4. You can increase this value up to 32 by editing the /kernel/drv/md.conf file, as described in How to Increase the Number of Default Disk Sets. The number of shared disk sets is always one less than the md_nsets value, because the local disk set is included in md_nsets.
Unlike local volume administration, it is not necessary to manually create or delete state database replicas on the disk set. Solaris Volume Manager tries to balance a reasonable number of state database replicas across all disks in a disk set.
When disks are added to a disk set, Solaris Volume Manager rebalances the state database replicas across the remaining disks. Later, if necessary, you can change the replica layout with the metadb command.