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Encapsulating SAN disks

A Solaris system may be booted from a SAN disk under the following conditions:

• For Solaris 9, the operating system must first be installed on an internal boot disk. The ufsdump and ufsrestore commands can then be used to create a bootable SAN disk. For more information, refer to the Sun document Automating the Installation of an FC-Fabric SAN-Booted System at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/fc_fabric_san.html.
• For Solaris 10, the operating system can also be installed directly onto a fabric disk in a SAN environment.

Veritas Volume Manager can encapsulate a bootable SAN disk provided that the disk is listed as being supported for this purpose in the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) on the support site at http://support.veritas.com.

For some disk arrays, special hardware configuration may be required to allow a system to be booted from one of the LUNs in the array. Refer to the documentation supplied by the array vendor for more information. Having configured the disk array so that you can boot your system from it, you can proceed to encapsulate it using VxVM.

 To migrate from an internal boot disk to a SAN boot disk

1. Verify that the HCL lists the target SAN disk as being supported for SAN booting.
2. Use menu item 1 (Add or initialize one or more disks) from the vxdiskadm main menu, or the VEA to add the target SAN disk to the boot disk group (aliased as bootdg).
3. Use menu item 6 (Mirror Volumes on a Disk) from the vxdiskadm main menu, or the VEA to create a mirror of the root disk on the target disk.
4. Boot from the mirror disk to verify that the system is still bootable.

   Once you have booted the system from the SAN disk, you can mirror it to another SAN disk that has been added to the boot disk group.

   If required, you can remove the plexes of the original boot disk by using the vxplex command. For example, the following command removes the plexes rootvol-01, swapvol-01, and home-01 that are configured on the boot disk:

   # vxplex -o rm dis rootvol-01 swapvol-01 home-01