Having actually installed my X2100 M2 servers, I want to mirror the boot disk.
As an aside, I found Sun Infodoc 83605. This says:
It is recommended to use Hardware RAID controllers for the Root disk mirror, for performance and reliability reasons.
and then a little later, being consistent:
Sun Fire x2100 uses an nVidia RAID controller. Solaris OS doesn't support the nVidia driver as of now, so Solaris Volume Manager is the only option for mirroring the root disk.
OK, so I can't use hardware raid at the present time, which means (I think) that I can't hotswap the drives.
But anyway, I do the regular thing to mirror the boot disk with SVM. Works fine. I installgrub and use eeprom to define an alternate boot path. I reboot both servers. One comes back all fine and dandy.
The other one is dead. Faulty boot archive. Can't start console services. Remember that I'm having a wee bit of trouble controlling these machines, so getting to a failsafe system is a bit tricky. I fiddle for a bit, but rebooting doesn't help.
I was going to reinstall anyway, so pxe boot away. This time, I can't even see the console output. Oh dear, it's getting worse....
2 comments:
Actually, Sun Intros describe x2100/x2200 disks as "hot-pluggable". In other hand, x4x00 disks are "hot-swapable". So, it seems that nvidia controllers only support hot inserting disk and not removing.
The onboard raid isn't really hardware raid, it's more like software-raid with bios assistance. Hardware raid is referring to some PCI controller.
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