Upgrading Hardware

This section prepares you for hardware upgrades to devices within your environment.

General Prerequisites

Before starting the upgrade process, be sure to do the following:

• Determine whether the hardware addition or change requires a software upgrade.

  Examples of changes that require a software upgrade include changes to the class of your server or significant increases in storage capacity. Examples of changes that do not require a software upgrade include additions to memory and increases in disk cache.

• If you are switching from a SPARC to an AMD server platform (or from AMD to SPARC), you must take precautions to prevent loss of data. See Switching Between SPARC and AMD Platforms for details.

• Read the hardware manufacturer's installation instructions carefully. Also read the information on adding hardware in your Oracle Solaris OS system administrator documentation.

• Check the Equipment Ordinal values in your old and new mcf files. For information about the mcf file, see mcf(4) in Sun QFS and Sun Storage Archive Manager 5.3 Reference Manual.

• Decide whether the backup copies you have on hand are sufficient. For information about backing up your data and metadata, see the procedures described in Setting Up Dump Files.

  • In a Sun QFS environment, the qfsdump command dumps all data and metadata. For more information about this process, see qfsdump(1M) in Sun QFS and Sun Storage Archive Manager 5.3 Reference Manual.

  • In SAM-QFS environments, the samfsdump command dumps all metadata. You must ensure that all files that need to be archived have an archive copy. Use the sfind command on each SAM-QFS file system to see which files do not have an archive copy. In the following example, /sam1 is the mount point.

    # sfind /sam1 ! -type d ! -archived > /tmp/notarchived.list

• Ensure that the system is quiet, with no users logged in.

• In SAM-QFS environments, ensure that the archiver is in wait mode and is not running.

  You can idle the archiver in one of the following ways:

  • Insert a wait directive into the /etc/opt/SUNWsamfs/archiver.cmd file. For more information about the wait directive and the archiver.cmd file, see archiver.cmd(4) in Sun QFS and Sun Storage Archive Manager 5.3 Reference Manual.

  • Use the samu operator utility.

  • Issue the following command:

    # samcmd aridle

For more information, see samcmd(1M) in Sun QFS and Sun Storage Archive Manager 5.3 Reference Manual.

Switching Between SPARC and AMD Platforms

The following are some important considerations if you are combining or changing between SPARC and x86 hardware platforms:

• Sun QFS software is supported only for the Oracle Solaris 10 OS on x64 platforms (AMD64 architecture), not for the EM64T architecture. With the exception of the Sun QFS shared Linux client and the Oracle Solaris 10 x86 shared client, it is also not supported for any 32-bit x86 architectures.

• All functions supported by Sun QFS software on the SPARC platform are also supported on the x64 platform except for the following:

  • The ADIC/Grau, Fujitsu LMF, IBM 3494, and Sony network attached libraries are not supported on x64 platforms. Sun StorageTek ACSLS-attached automated libraries are supported on x64 platforms.

  • Optical (MO and UDO) storage libraries and drives are not supported on x64 platforms.

  • SANergy software is not supported on x64 platforms.

  • SCSI-attached tape drives are not supported on x64 platforms because of a lack of support in the SCSI HBA 64-bit drivers for large block sizes. Both SCSI-attached libraries and fibre-attached libraries are supported with fibre-attached tape drives.

• EFI labels are required on all disks if your Sun QFS shared file system configuration contains both the Oracle Solaris 10 OS on x64 platforms and the Oracle Solaris 10 OS on SPARC platforms. See Configuring EFI Labels for Shared x64 and SPARC Volumes for information on relabeling disks.

• Exercise caution when accessing the same SAN-attached storage from an Oracle Solaris environment on both SPARC and x64 platforms. The Oracle Solaris OS on x64 platforms cannot interpret the SMI VTOC8 disk label created by the Oracle Solaris OS on SPARC platforms, and the Oracle Solaris OS on SPARC platforms cannot interpret the SMI VTOC16 disk label created by the Oracle Solaris OS on x64. This can make it appear as though a disk is unlabeled, when in fact it is labeled and in use by a platform of a different architecture type. For example, a disk that is labeled with SMI VTOC8 may have mounted partitions in use by Oracle Solaris on a SPARC platform, but will appear as unlabeled when viewed with the format partition command by Oracle Solaris on an x64 platform. If you make the mistake of running fdisk as prompted by the format command, you will destroy the contents of that disk.

• You cannot change the architecture type of the server responsible for control of the file system metadata operations, that is, the server that was used to create the file system with the sammkfs command. Therefore:

  • For a Sun QFS stand-alone file system, you cannot mount the file system on a server that has a different architecture type from the one that created it.

  • For a Sun QFS shared file system, you cannot change the architecture type of the metadata server or any potential metadata servers because the different architectures use different byte-ordering schemes (endianness). However, you can migrate data from one architecture type to the other by copying the file system to temporary storage using either the qfsdump command or the samfsdump command, re-creating the file system using sammkfs command, and then repopulating the file system with qfsrestoreor samfsrestore.

• The Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager I/O multipathing feature (MPxIO) is disabled by default for the Oracle Solaris 10 OS on the SPARC platform and enabled by default for the Oracle Solaris 10 OS on x64. This feature should be configured the same way for all systems in your Sun QFS shared file system configuration. It is configured in /kernel/drv/fp.conf for the Oracle Solaris 10 OS.

• In a Sun QFS shared file system environment, a configuration error will be generated if you have potential metadata servers of different architecture types (SPARC and x64) defined in the /etc/opt/SUNWsamfs/hosts.fs file.

Configuring EFI Labels for Shared x64 and SPARC Volumes

Use the prtvtoc command to determine whether a disk contains SMI or EFI labels. Under the Dimensions section of the output, SMI labels list the number of accessible cylinders, whereas EFI labels list the number of accessible sectors.

Note that EFI labels reserve the first 34 sectors, which misaligns Sun RAID-5 storage from a performance perspective. Unless you realign the storage, you will incur a RAID-5 read/modify/write performance penalty whenever writing. You can avoid this performance penalty by selecting the proper starting sector for all disk partitions for your particular storage configuration. For example, an 8+P Sun StorageTek T3 array with a 64K block size should have starting sectors that are multiples of 1024 for all disk slices ((8 * 64 * 1024) / 512 = 1024). Similarly, a 5+P Sun StorageTek 3510 FC array with a 128K block size should have starting sectors that are multiples of 1280 for all disk slices ((5 * 128 * 1024) / 512 = 1280).

How to Convert Disk Labels From the Default SMI VTOC8 to EFI

1. Copy the file system to temporary storage using the qfsdump command or the samfsdump command.
2. Relabel the disks with EFI labels using the format -e command.

   When using the Oracle Solaris format -e command to create EFI labels, you can select the partition command from the menu to create and modify partitions (slices). When doing this, you must specify a tag id name of user, rather than stand or unassigned, for EFI labels.

3. Re-create the file system using the sammkfs command.
4. Repopulate the file system with the qfsrestore command or the samfsrestore command.