Encapsulating SAN disks

Most fourth generation servers do not have local storage. They support booting from a SAN; that is, booting directly from a multi-pathed storage array.

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

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):

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000107677

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 Add or initialize one or more disks from the vxdiskadm main menu to add the target SAN disk to the boot disk group (aliased as bootdg).
  3. Use Mirror Volumes on a Disk from the vxdiskadm main menu 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