Saving Disk Partition Information (Solstice DiskSuite)

Maintain disk partitioning information for all nodes and multihost disks in the Sun Cluster configuration. Keep this information up-to-date as new disks are added to the disksets and when any of the disks are repartitioned. You need this information to perform disk replacement.

The disk partitioning information for the local disks is not as critical because the local disks on all Sun Cluster nodes should have been partitioned identically. Most likely, you can obtain the local disk partition information from another Sun Cluster node if a local disk fails.

When a multihost disk is replaced, the replacement disk must have the same partitioning as the disk it is replacing. Depending on how a disk has failed, this information might not be available when replacement is performed. Therefore, it is especially important to retain a record of the disk partitioning information if you have several different partitioning schemes in your disksets.

Though VxVM does not impose this restriction, it is still a good idea to save this information.

A simple way to save disk partitioning information is shown in the following sample script. This type of script should be run after the Sun Cluster software has been configured. In this example, the files containing the volume table of contents (VTOC) information are written to the local /etc/opt/SUNWcluster/vtoc directory by the prtvtoc(1M) command.

#! /bin/sh
DIR=/etc/opt/SUNWcluster/vtoc
mkdir -p $DIR
cd /dev/rdsk
for i in *s7
do prtvtoc $i >$DIR/$i || rm $DIR/$i
done

Each of the disks in a Solstice DiskSuite diskset is required to have a Slice 7. This slice contains the metadevice state database replicas.

If a local disk also has a valid Slice 7, the VTOC information also will be saved by the sample script. However, this should not occur for the boot disk, because typically a boot disk does not have a valid Slice 7.

Make certain that the script is run while none of the disks is owned by another Sun Cluster node. The script will work if the logical hosts are in maintenance mode, if the logical hosts are owned by the local host, or if Sun Cluster is not running.