The main advantage of clusters is protection against hardware failure. Should the primary node fail or otherwise become unavailable, applications can continue to run by transferring their execution to standby nodes in the cluster.
CVM can be deployed in the control domains of multiple physical hosts running LDoms, providing high availability of the control domain.
Figure: CVM configuration in an Solaris Logical Domain environment illustrates a CVM configuration.
If a control domain encounters a hardware or software failure causing the domain to shut down, all applications running in the guest LDoms on that host are also affected. These applications can be failed over and restarted inside guests running on another active node of the cluster.
Shared volumes and their snapshots can be used as a backing store for guest LDoms.
The following example procedure shows how snapshots of shared volumes are administered in such an environment. In the example, datavol1 is a shared volume being used by guest LDom ldom1 and c0d2s2 is the front end for this volume visible from ldom1.
To take a snapshot of datavol1
primary# ldm stop ldom1
primary# ldm unbind ldom1
This ensures that all the file system metadata is flushed down to the backend volume, datavol1.
Create a snapshot of datavol1.
See the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator's Guide for information on creating and managing third-mirror break-off snapshots.
Once the snapshot operation is complete, rebind and restart ldom1.
primary# ldm bind ldom1
primary# ldm start ldom1