--
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Sean Harvey OAO Corp harvey@nmc8.chinalake.navy.mil
Ridgecrest CA (619)939-2199
The future masters of technology will have to be
lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters
the grim and the dumb. -- Marshall McLuhan,
1969 |
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
ORIGINAL QUESTION:
>Dear friends,
>
>Can I get some feedback from people who have used Disksuite 4.0 Rev 1
>under Solaris 2.5.1 to mirror.
>
>I tried it and it is very erratic. The metastat command shows that
>everything is OK. But it is not consistent. Sometimes if I edit a file,
>the mirrored copy gets /dev/nulled. Sometimes the edit copies OK.
>Sometimes nothing happens.
>
>I installed patch 102580-14 and it seemed to make things worse.
>
>Is this software any good or is it buggy?
>
>Any input will be appreciated.
>
>Sean
>
I recieved many responses, all positive. The general opinion of these experts who use the Disksuite product for mirroring is that is is a good and reliable product. As for my owm problem: I had left my submirror mounted. I wanted to check and see if the mirror was in fact working. If one wants to check the submirror, I found, one must first umount the metadevice and then mount the submirror. Also, metatool can be very useful.
Thanks for all the replies and tips. Now I too have a high opinion of this product!
Sean
Here are a few of the responses I recieved:
The software is used on many production servers for financial controlling
and have had no problems at all, in fact it has saved my arse several times
as we trade 24/7 and down time is scheduled 2 months in advance.
======================
I've installed the disksuite software (versions rom 1.0 through 4.0)
many times at many different sites and as far as my experience goes it
works very reliably, although you do need the patch.
=========================
We found lots of problems before we installed 102580-13 and 103153-11 (SunOs
5.5) or 103591-04 (SunOs 5.5.1).
Since then we have been running mirrored system drives (including swap)
plus transaction file systems without problems.
============================
I'm sure you'll get some similar responses, so here I go. I have disksuite
running on three machines. SS20 and 2 ultra's. A simple concat. on two 9gb
drives. I assume:
1) drives are of similar geometry. If not you'll lose many MB of space.
Performance will be diminished.
2) several replica's were made on different disks and disk partitions.
3) a good newfs was made on the raw md device. and fsck checked out ok.
If all of the above were done then I don't know what could go wrong software
wise. Good cables? termintation? cable length?
Hope this helps
========================
Well, FWIW, I've been testing 4.0 on 2.5 for a little while now and
I'm fairly happy with it. No real problems to report. We're about
to deploy it to a bunch of systems.
I don't know anything about 4.0 but I installed 4.1 on Sun Ultra 2 running
2.5.1 and it works great ! I have mirrored internal disk (/, /usr, /var, swap)
and my Sparc Storage Array is RAID 5 configured. I just followed their examples
in Answerbook.
================================
I used older versions of disksuite under SunOS 4.x and had no trouble
using the command line features. I have been using it for over a year
on two mission-critical servers running Solaris 2.5.1, but I have only
used the GUI tool to do setup and management (metatool). Works great
for me. Have you tried using metatool?
===========================
I've used disksuite 4.0 for mirroring and it's been pretty good. We
installed the 102580-15 patch. The only issues I saw were when I didn't set
the path before starting the GUI but instead started it with ./metatool, so
later it hung. Also whenever I mirror a swap partition, it doesn't update
vfstab for me, I have to do it manually.
===========================
THANKS TO:
Vasu Vuppala
Jason Noorman
Kevin.Sheehan
Glenn Satchel
Steve Phelps
David Poore
Manjeet Rekhi
Pascal Gaudette
Justin Young
Dean Humphrey
Keith Salustro
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:49 CDT