Sun Cluster System Administration Guide for Solaris OS

ProcedureHow to Create More Than Three Disk Sets in a Cluster

If you are running Solaris 9 and intend to create more than three disk sets in the cluster, perform the following steps before you create the disk sets. You do not need to perform this procedure if you are running Solaris 10. Follow these steps if you are installing disk sets for the first time or if you are adding more disk sets to a fully configured cluster.

This procedure provides the long forms of the Sun Cluster commands. Most commands also have short forms. Except for the long and short forms of the command names, the commands are identical. For a list of the commands and their short forms, see Appendix A, Sun Cluster Object-Oriented Commands.

  1. Ensure that the value of the md_nsets variable is high enough. The value should accommodate the total number of disk sets you intend to create in the cluster.

    1. On any node of the cluster, check the value of the md_nsets variable in the /kernel/drv/md.conf file.

    2. If the number of disk sets in the cluster will be greater than the existing value of md_nsets minus one, increase the value of md_nsets on each node.

      The maximum permissible number of disk sets is the value of md_nsets minus one. The maximum possible value of md_nsets is 32.

    3. Ensure that the /kernel/drv/md.conf file is identical on each node of the cluster.


      Caution – Caution –

      Failure to follow this guideline can result in serious Solaris Volume Manager errors and possible loss of data.


    4. From one node, shut down the cluster.


      # cluster shutdown -g0 -y
      
    5. Reboot each node in the cluster.

      • On SPARC based systems, do the following:


        ok boot
        
      • On x86 based systems, do the following:

        When the GRUB menu is displayed, select the appropriate Solaris entry and press Enter. The GRUB menu appears similar to the following:


        GNU GRUB version 0.95 (631K lower / 2095488K upper memory)
        +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        | Solaris 10 /sol_10_x86                                                  |
        | Solaris failsafe                                                        |
        |                                                                         |
        +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        Use the ^ and v keys to select which entry is highlighted.
        Press enter to boot the selected OS, 'e' to edit the
        commands before booting, or 'c' for a command-line.
  2. On each node in the cluster, run the devfsadm(1M) command.

    You can run this command on all nodes in the cluster at the same time.

  3. From one node of the cluster, run the cldevice populate command.

  4. On each node, verify that the cldevice populate command has been completed before you attempt to create any disk sets.

    The cldevice command calls itself remotely on all nodes, even when the command is run from just one node. To determine whether the cldevice populate command has completed processing, run the following command on each node of the cluster.


    # ps -ef | grep scgdevs