Guidelines for the /globaldevices File System

Sun Cluster software offers two choices of locations to host the global-devices namespace:

• A lofi device (Solaris 10 only)

• A dedicated file system on one of the local disks (Solaris 9 or 10)

This section describes the guidelines for using a dedicated partition. This information does not apply if you instead host the global-devices namespace on a lofi.

The /globaldevices file system is usually located on your root disk. However, if you use different storage on which to locate the global-devices file system, such as a Logical Volume Manager volume, it must not be part of a Solaris Volume Manager shared disk set or part of a VxVM disk group other than a root disk group. This file system is later mounted as a UFS cluster file system. Name this file system /globaldevices, which is the default name that is recognized by the scinstall(1M) command.

No file-system type other than UFS is valid for the global-devices file system. Do not attempt to change the file-system type after the global-devices file system is created.

However, a UFS global-devices file system can coexist on a node with other root file systems that use ZFS.

The scinstall command later renames the file system /global/.devices/node@nodeid, where nodeid represents the number that is assigned to a Solaris host when it becomes a global-cluster member. The original /globaldevices mount point is removed.

The /globaldevices file system must have ample space and ample inode capacity for creating both block special devices and character special devices. This guideline is especially important if a large number of disks are in the cluster. A file system size of 512 Mbytes should suffice for most cluster configurations.