2.2.4 Planning Your Solaris Operating Environment Installation

All nodes in a cluster must be installed with the same version of the Solaris operating environment (Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7) before you can install the Sun Cluster software. When you install Solaris on cluster nodes, follow the general rules in this section.

• Install the Entire Distribution Solaris software packages on all Sun Cluster nodes.

All platforms except the E10000 require at least the Entire Distribution Solaris installation, for both the Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 7 operating environments. E10000 systems require the Entire Distribution + OEM.

• After installing the Solaris operating environment, you must install the latest patches. For the current list of required patches for the Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7 operating environments, consult your Enterprise Services representative or service provider.

• If you are upgrading from an earlier version of the Solaris operating environment:

  • You must use the upgrade option in the Solaris Interactive Installation program (rather than reinstalling the operating environment) and be prepared to increase the size of your root (/) and /usr slices to accommodate the Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7 environment.

  • The upgrade option in the Solaris Interactive Installation program provides the ability to reallocate disk space if the current file systems don't have enough space for the upgrade. By default, an auto-layout feature tries to determine how to reallocate the disk space so the upgrade can succeed. If auto-layout cannot determine how to reallocate disk space, you must specify which file systems can be moved or changed and run auto-layout again.

• If you are installing Sun Cluster for the first time:

  • Set up each Sun Cluster node as stand-alone machine. Do this in response to a question in the Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7 installation program.

  • Do not define an exported file system. HA-NFS file systems are not mounted on /export and only HA-NFS file systems should be NFS-shared on Sun Cluster nodes.

  • Disable the Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7 power management "autoshutdown" mechanism if it applies to any nodes in your Sun Cluster configuration. See the pwconfig(1M) and power.conf(4) man pages for details.

2.2.4.1 Using Solaris Interface Groups

A new feature called interface groups was added to the Solaris 2.6 operating environment. This feature is implemented as default behavior in Solaris 2.6, but as optional behavior in subsequent releases.

As described in the ifconfig(1M) man page, if an interface (logical or physical) shares an IP prefix with another interface, these interfaces are collected into an interface group. IP uses an interface group to rotate source address selection when the source address is unspecified, and in the case of multiple physical interfaces in the same group, to distribute traffic across different IP addresses on a per-IP-destination basis (see netstat(1M) for per-IP-destination information).

When enabled, this feature causes a problem with switchover of logical hosts. The system will experience RPC timeouts and the switchover will fail, causing the logical host to remain mastered on its current host.

Interface groups should be disabled on all cluster nodes. The status of interface groups is determined by the value of ip_enable_group_ifs in /etc/system.

The value for this parameter can be checked with the following ndd command:

# ndd /dev/ip ip_enable_group_ifs

If the value returned is 1 (enabled), disable interface groups by running the following command:

set ip:ip_enable_group_ifs=0

Whenever you modify the /etc/system file, you must reboot the system.

2.2.4.2 Partitioning System Disks

When Solaris 2.6 or Solaris 7 is installed, the system disk is partitioned into slices for root (/), /usr, and other standard file systems. You must change the partition configuration to meet the requirements of Sun Cluster and your volume manager. Use the guidelines in the following sections to allocate disk space accordingly.

File System Slices

Table 2-1 shows the slice number, contents, and suggested space allocation for file systems, swap space, and slices. These values are used as the default when you install Solaris with JumpStart^TM, but they are not required by Sun Cluster.

Volume Manager Slices

Additionally, if you will be using Solstice DiskSuite, you must set aside a 10 Mbyte slice on the system disk for metadevice state database replicas. See the Solstice DiskSuite documentation for more information about replicas.

If you will be using SSVM or CVM, you must set aside two partitions and a small amount of free space (1024 sectors) on each multihosted disk that is to be managed by SSVM or CVM, for the disk group rootdg. The free space should be located at the beginning or end of each disk and should not be allocated to any slice. Refer to "2.2.5.2 Sun StorEdge Volume Manager and Cluster Volume Manager Considerations", for more information.

The Root (/) Slice

The root (/) slice on your local disk must have enough space for the various files and directories as well as space for the device inodes in /devices and symbolic links in /dev.

The root slice also must be large enough to hold the following:

• Solaris system software

• Sun Cluster, some components from your volume management software, and any third party software packages

• Data space for symbolic links in /dev for the disk units and for volume manager use

Sun Cluster uses various shell scripts that run as root processes. For this reason, the /.cshrc* and /.profile files for user root should be empty or non-existent on the cluster nodes.

Your cluster might require a larger root file system if it contains large numbers of disk drives.

If you run out of free space, you must reinstall the operating environment on all cluster nodes to obtain additional free space in the root slice. Make sure at least 20 percent of the total space on the root slice is left free.

The /usr, /var, and /opt Slices

The /usr slice holds the user file system. The /var slice holds the system log files. The /opt slice holds the Sun Cluster and data service software packages. See the Solaris Advanced Installation Guide for details about changing the allocation values as Solaris is installed.