Overview of Administering Global Devices and the Global Namespace

Administration of Oracle Solaris Cluster device groups depends on the volume manager that is installed on the cluster. Solaris Volume Manager is “cluster-aware,” so you add, register, and remove device groups by using the Solaris Volume Manager metaset command. For more information, see the metaset(1M) man page.

Oracle Solaris Cluster software automatically creates a raw-disk device group for each disk and tape device in the cluster. However, cluster device groups remain in an offline state until you access the groups as global devices. When administering device groups, or volume manager disk groups, you need to be on the cluster node that is the primary node for the group.

Normally, you do not need to administer the global device namespace. The global namespace is automatically set up during installation and automatically updated during Oracle Solaris OS reboots. However, if the global namespace needs to be updated, you can run the cldevice populate command from any cluster node. This command causes the global namespace to be updated on all other cluster node members, as well as on nodes that might join the cluster in the future.

Global Device Permissions for Solaris Volume Manager

Changes made to global device permissions are not automatically propagated to all the nodes in the cluster for Solaris Volume Manager and disk devices. If you want to change permissions on global devices, you must manually change the permissions on all the nodes in the cluster. For example, if you want to change permissions on global device /dev/global/dsk/d3s0 to 644, you must issue the following command on all nodes in the cluster:

# chmod 644 /dev/global/dsk/d3s0

Dynamic Reconfiguration With Global Devices

You must consider the following issues when completing dynamic reconfiguration (DR) operations on disk and tape devices in a cluster.

• All of the requirements, procedures, and restrictions that are documented for the Oracle Solaris DR feature also apply to Oracle Solaris Cluster DR support. The only exception is for the operating system quiescence operation. Therefore, review the documentation for the Oracle Solaris DR feature before using the DR feature with Oracle Solaris Cluster software. You should review in particular the issues that affect non-network IO devices during a DR detach operation.

• Oracle Solaris Cluster rejects DR remove-board operations on active devices in the primary node. DR operations can be performed on inactive devices in the primary node and on any devices in the secondary nodes.

• After the DR operation, cluster data access continues as before.

• Oracle Solaris Cluster rejects DR operations that impact the availability of quorum devices. See Dynamic Reconfiguration With Quorum Devices for more information.

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Caution - If the current primary node fails while you are performing the DR operation on a secondary node, cluster availability is impacted. The primary node will have no place to fail over until a new secondary node is provided.

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To perform DR operations on global devices, complete the following steps in the order indicated.

Table 5-1 Task Map: Dynamic Reconfiguration With Disk and Tape Devices