Hey All,

This thread reminded me to share our experiences with you.

In December '98, we setup a Sun E450 server running Solaris 2.6.  In an
attempt to provide redundancy and high availability, we installed
Solaris Enterprise (Veritas) Volume Manager and configured mirrors for
root and a second drive.  After we had Volume Manager running, we
installed ADSM 3.1.2.1.  As part of the ADSM install, we placed the ADSM
database and recovery log onto the second drive.

Unfortunately, when it came time to configure raw drives for the storage
pool, ADSM did not recognize that Volume Manager was controlling a drive
and allowed that drive to be formatted, partitioned and configured as
raw when, in fact, this drive had a file system, was mounted and had
ADSM's database and recovery log on it.  Obviously, ADSM crashed as soon
as the storage pool tried to store data on a raw drive which was also
supposed to be a file system drive containing the ADSM database and
recovery log.

We did not learn why we were experiencing ADSM crashes until we replaced
Volume Manager with Solstice Disk Suite (SDS) in an attempt to get a
stable server.  Once we restored ADSM, and had the Storage Pool wipe out
the database drive again, we got errors indicating that the metadata for
SDS did not match with the physical drive configurations.

Sun's support engineer tested, and confirmed, that Sun's format command
will allow a drive under control of SDS or Volume Manager to be
repartitioned without complaint and the Administrator may not be any
wiser until the system crashes, or is rebooted.

Apparently, the problem is due to the fact that Sun's format command
only checks for drives mounted under the /dev/dsk path.  SDS mounts
drives under the /dev/md/dsk path and Volume Manager uses the path
/dev/vx/dsk.

Good Luck!

Russell Street wrote:
>
>
> The trick is that ADSM checks to see if a file system exists on the
> disk before using it.  If it can find a file system it refuses to use
> the raw disk space.

--
Mark Dyer
Mark Dyer
Systems Administrator               e-mail: mark.dyer AT fle.gmpt.gmeds DOT com
Service Delivery - UNIX Team         voice: (810) 236-0373 [8-446]
                                       fax: (810) 236-9290 [8-446]

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