Physical Disk Structure

Physical storage objects:

• The basic physical storage device that ultimately stores your data is the hard disk.
• When you install your operating system, hard disks are formatted as part of the installation program.
• Partitioning is the basic method of organizing a disk to prepare for files to be written to and retrieved from the disk.
• A partitioned disk has a prearranged storage pattern that is designed for the storage and retrieval of data.

(The book then goes into the basic disk layouts that Sun, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux uses.)

Fundamentals: Virtual Objects

Topic 1: Physical Data Storage

• Identify the structural characteristics of a disk that are affected by placing a disk under VxVM control.

Topic 2: Virtual Data Storage

• Describe the structural characteristics of a disk after it is placed under VxVM control.

Topic 3: VM Storage Objects

• Identify the virtual objects that are created by VxVM to manage data storage, including disk groups, VxVM disks, subdisks, plexes, and volumes.

Topic 4: VM RAID levels

• Define VxVM RAID levels and identify virtual storage layout types used by VxVM to remap address space.

Veritas Storage Foundation 4.1 Overview

Just finished Veritas’ Storage Foundation 4.1 class and I want to put the info on here for two reasons: 1) Quick reference for issues and 2) the cert test is based on this class.

I’ll need to come back in order to emphasize the cert topics.

There are two books given in the class. “Veritas Storage Foundation 4.1 for Unix: Fundamentals” goes over basic terminology and commands. “Veritas Storage Foundation 4.1 for Unix: Maintenance” is geared more for working with an established setup.

Sun irritates me at times

Tasked with upgrading another sysadmin's app and Oracle boxes (app on a 15K domain and database on a v880) on short notice. Thus had no time for proper research.

Due to my unfamiliarity to the other sysadmin's system, I chose to do a upgrade instead of installing from a flar. This added significantly to my pucker factor, as upgrades have a reputation (undeserved with current versions?) for being problematic. Further, /opt was not on the bootdg and had to be moved.

Well, Veritas' upgrade_start went without a hitch. I then upgraded the OSs (off CD on v880 and jumpstart on 15K). I then ran Veritas' upgrade_finish and upon reboot the fun began.

The box failed into maint mode as it couldn't stat what vfstab indicated were the root partitions. I was able to look at vfstab read-only and see that Veritas' script incorrectly modified my vfstab.

Joy.

I booted off of CD and was able to correct my vfstab. On reboot I was able to get to run level 3, but my Oracle and app partitions were unmountable. So after spending a few hours with a competent Brit Veritas tech, we found the following problems:

1) Sun 9's upgrade install (I was going from 8 to 9) blew away my sd.conf. This allowed me to only stat seven of my disks. I had saved off the sd.conf before starting on the advice of a co-worker. The funny thing is that I ribbed him for being overly paranoid. If I hadn't had the file on hand, I would have had to restore from NetBackup.

2) Veritas' vxfs Sun 8 binaries are incompatible with Sun 9. So, I had to pkgrm VRTSvxfs and then pkgadd VRTSvxfs in order to make it happy.

Note: none of the above was even hinted at in either Sun's or Veritas' documentation. Even the Veritas tech indicated that the script was known to be buggy (!!!).

HP-UX is SOOOOOO much better. Jumpstart is a pathetic, broken thing when compared to HP's Ignite. Further, I'd have no need for Veritas if I was using HP-UX.

And yet Sun is all over the place and HP keeps loosing market share.

????