Archive
Posts in Storage
Populating /dev/sg when Leadville drivers are in use
For the past day and a half, I have been trying to create device entries for several STK 9940B drives in the /dev/sg directory on a Solaris 10 server that is using the emlx driver. This should be straight forward, since Netbackup provides the sg.build shell script to assist with populating the sg.conf and devlink.tab files. Due to some issues with the way the sg.build script parses the output from luxadm, the script isn't able to locate the WWPN of the emlx controlled HBAs in our servers. Once I found the problem, I was able to get things working by hand editing the results from the sg.build prior to updating the system files…
$ read more →Using the Emulex storage tools to manage Leadville controlled Emulex adapters
With the introduction of Solaris 10, the Sun leadville storage stack was integrated into Solaris. This means that you no longer need to download and install the SFS stack or third party drivers, and the native Solaris tools (e.g., iostat, mpathadm, fcinfo, luxadm, etc.) can be used to manage specific aspects of storage management. I would like to emphasize the word "specific," since there are a number of management tasks that can't be performed (or performed easily) with the built-in tools. If you happen to be using Emulex host bus adapters with Solaris 10, you are in luck…
$ read more →An MD device that went too far
Recently I was approached to help debug a problem with a Linux MD device that wouldn't start. When I ran raidstart to start the device, it spit out a number of errors on the console, and messages similar to the following were written to the system log: After pondering the error for a bit, it dawned on me that the partition table might be fubar. My theory proved correct, since partition six (the one associated with the md device that wouldn't start) had an ending cylinder count (7476) that was greater than the number of physical cylinders (7294) on the drive: Once I corrected the end cyclinder and recreated the file system, everything worked as expected. Now I have no idea how the system got into this state (I didn't build the system), since the installers I tested display errors when you specify an ending cylinder count that is larger than the maximum number of cylinders available.
$ read more →Solaris fibre channel management
With the introduction of Solaris 10, storage management has changed considerably. The storage foundation kit is now integrated into the base OS, the leadville driver has been expanded to include HBAs from Emulex, JNI and Qlogic, and the fcinfo utility as well as several mdb DCMDS were added to view fibre channel connectivity information. fcinfo is especially useful, since it provides a tool with the base Operating System to view HBA and connectivity information. The fcinfo utility has two main options…
$ read more →Resizing Veritas volumes with vxresize
We were getting close to running out of space on one of our database volumes last week, and I needed to add some additional storage to ensure that things kept running smoothly. The admin who originally created the VxVM database volume only used half of each of the five disks that were associated with the volume / file system that were at capacity, which meant I had roughly 18GB of free space available on each device to work with: GROUP DISK DEVICE TAG OFFSET LENGTH FLAGS datadg D01 c2t0d0s2 c2t0d0 35547981 35547981 - datadg D02 c2t1d0s2 c2t1d0 35547981 35547981 - datadg D03 c2t2d0s2 c2t2d0 35547981 35547981 - datadg D04 c2t3d0s2 c2t3d0 35547981 35547981 - datadg D05 c2t4d0s2 c2t4d0 35547981 35547981 - datadg D06 c2t5d0s2 c2t5d0 35547981 35547981 - Now there are a number of ways to resize volumes and file systems with VxVM and VxFS. You can use vxassist to grow or shrink a volume, and then use the fsadm utility to extend the file system. You can also perform both of these operations with vxresize, which takes the name of the volume to resize, the disk group the volume is a part of, and a size parameter to indicate that you want to grow (you use a "+" to indicate that you want to grow the volume by the value immediately following the plus sign) or shrink (you use a "-" to indicate that you want to shrink the volume by the value immediately following the dash) the volume…
$ read more →