Guidelines for Working With Disk Sets

When working with disk sets, consider the following guidelines:

• Solaris Volume Manager must be configured on each host that will be connected to the disk set.

• Each host must have its local state database set up before you can create disk sets.

• The sequence of steps for creating a disk set and creating the volumes for that disk set is to, first, create the disk set. Then, add the disks to the disk set. Finally, create the volumes in the disk set.

• To create and work with a disk set in a clustering environment, root must be a member of Group 14. Alternatively, the /.rhosts file on each host must contain an entry for the other host names associated with the disk set.

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  Note - This step is not necessary in a SunCluster 3.x environment.

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• To perform maintenance on a disk set, a host must be the owner of the disk set or have reserved the disk set. A host takes implicit ownership of the disk set by putting the first drives into the disk set.

• You cannot add a drive to a disk set that is in use for a file system, database or any other application. Before you add a drive, make sure that it is not currently being used.

• Do not add to a disk set a drive containing existing data that you want to preserve. The process of adding the disk to the disk set repartitions the disk and destroys existing data.

• Unlike local volume administration, it is not necessary to manually create or delete state database replicas on the disk set. Solaris Volume Manager tries to balance a reasonable number of state database replicas across all drives in a disk set.

• When drives are added to a disk set, Solaris Volume Manager rebalances the state database replicas across the remaining drives. Later, if necessary, you can change the replica layout with the metadb command.