Metadevice and Diskset Administration

Metadevices and disksets are created and administered using either Solstice DiskSuite command-line utilities or the DiskSuite Tool (metatool(1M)) graphical user interface.

Read the information in this chapter before using the Solstice DiskSuite documentation to administer disksets and metadevices in a Sun Cluster configuration.

Disksets are groups of disks. The primary administration task that you perform on disksets involves adding and removing disks.

Before using a disk that you have placed in a diskset, you must set up a metadevice using the disk's slices. A metadevice can be a concatenation, stripe, mirror, or UFS logging device (also called a trans device). You can also create hot spare pools that contain slices to serve as replacements when a metadevice is errored.

Metadevice names begin with d and are followed by a number. By default in a Sun Cluster configuration, there are 128 unique metadevices in the range 0 to 127. Each UFS logging device that you create will use at least seven metadevice names. Therefore, in a large Sun Cluster configuration, you might need more than the 128 default metadevice names. For instructions on changing the default quantity, refer to the Solstice DiskSuite documentation. Hot spare pool names begin with hsp and are followed by a number. You can have up to 1,000 hot spare pools ranging from hsp000 to hsp999.

About Disksets

This section provides overview information on disksets and their relationship to logical hosts, and procedures on how to add and remove disks from the diskset associated with the logical host.

Sun Cluster logical hosts are mastered by physical hosts. Only the physical host that currently masters a logical host can access the logical host's diskset. When a physical host masters a logical host's diskset, it is said to have ownership of the diskset. In general, Sun Cluster takes care of diskset ownership. However, if the logical host is in maintenance state, as reported by the hastat(1M) command, you can use the DiskSuite metaset -t command to manually take diskset ownership. Before returning the logical host to service, release diskset ownership with the metaset -r command.

If the logical hosts are up and running, you should never perform diskset administration using either the -t (take ownership) or -r (release ownership) options of the metaset(1M) command. These options are used internally by the Sun Cluster software and must be coordinated between the cluster nodes.