Booting From a SPARCstorage Array

Sun Cluster supports booting from a private or shared disk inside a SPARCstorage Array.

Consider these points when using a boot disk in an SSA:

• Make sure that each cluster node's boot disk is on a different SSA. If nodes share a single SSA for their boot disks, the loss of a single controller would bring down all nodes.

• For VxVM configurations, do not configure a boot disk and a quorum device on the same tray. This is especially true for a two-node cluster. If you place both on the same tray, the cluster loses one of its nodes as well as its quorum device when you remove the tray. If for any reason a reconfiguration happens on the surviving node during this time, the cluster is lost. If a controller containing the boot disk and the quorum disk becomes faulty, the node that has its boot disk on the bad controller inevitably hangs or crashes, causing the other node to reconfigure and abort, since the quorum device is inaccessible. (This is a likely scenario in a minimal configuration consisting of two SSAs with boot disks and no root disk mirroring.)

• Mirroring the boot disks in a bootable SSA configuration is recommended. However, there is an impact on software upgrades. Neither Solaris nor the volume manager software can be upgraded while the root disk is mirrored. In such configurations, perform upgrades carefully to avoid corruption of the root file system. Refer to "Mirroring Root (/)", for additional information on mirroring the root file system.