SVM and Solaris Express 4/05

The latest release of
Solaris Express
came out yesterday. As usual a summary is on

Dan’s blog.

One new Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) capability in this release
is better integration with the Solaris

Reconfiguration Coordination Manager (RCM) framework.
This is the fix for bug:

4927518 SVM could be more intelligent when components are being unconfigured

SVM has had some RCM integration since Solaris 9 update 2. Starting
in that release, if you attempted to Dynamically Reconfigure (DR) out
a disk that was in use by SVM, you would get a nice message explaining
how SVM was using the disk. However, this was really only the
bare minimum of what we could do to integrate with the RCM
framework. The problem that is identified by bug 4927518 is that
if the disk has died you should just be able to DR it out so you can
replace it. Up to now what would happen is you would get the message
explaining that the disk was part of an SVM configuration. You had to
manually unconfigure the SVM metadevice before you could DR out the disk.
For example, if the disk was on one side of a mirror, you would have had
to detach the submirror, delete it, DR out the disk, DR in the
new one, recreate the submirror and reattach it to the mirror. Then
you would have incurred a complete resync of the newly attached
submirror. Obviously this is not very clean.

With the latest Solaris Express release SVM will clean up the systems
internal state for the dead disk so that you can just DR it out
without detaching and deleting the submirror. Once
you DR in a new disk you can just enable it into the mirror and
only that disk will be resynced, not the whole submirror. This is
a big improvement for the manageability of SVM. There are more
integration improvements like this coming for SVM. In another
blog entry I’ll also try to highlight some of the areas of integration
we already have with SVM and other Solaris features.