SUMMARY: Preserving DiskSuite metadevices across an upgrade

Hi,

Thanks very much to all who replied:

John T. Douglass
Matthew Stier
Atha Kouroussis
michael.wilkinson
Phillips, John
John Malick
Cyril Jaouich


I was able to migrate my mirrored stripes to the new version of
DiskSuite without restoring from backup.  The procedure was:

1) Make sure you have a good backup

2) Prior to the upgrade, run metadb and metastat -p and record
   the output

3) Shutdown and install Solaris 8 (do not make any changes to the
   hardware configuration of the server during the upgrade) 

4) Install DiskSuite 4.2.1 and any patches (108693-??)

5) Use the output from metadb in step 2 to recreate the state 
   database replicas as they were before, i.e.

   metadb -a -f c0t1d0s0 c0t2d0s0 ...

6) Create /etc/lvm/md.tab with information about the mirrored 
   devices taken from the output of metastat -p in step 2, but
   edited so that the mirrors are one way mirrors only.  For
   example, if metastat -p gave you:

   d4 -m d14 d24 1
   d14 1 3 c1t5d0s1 c1t6d0s1 c1t7d0s1 -i 128b
   d24 1 3 c0t1d0s1 c0t2d0s1 c0t3d0s0 -i 128b

   you would create /etc/lvm/md.tab with:

   d4 -m d14
   d14 1 3 c1t5d0s1 c1t6d0s1 c1t7d0s1 -i 128b
   d24 1 3 c0t1d0s1 c0t2d0s1 c0t3d0s0 -i 128b

   Note:  I removed all the entries for the OS disk mirrors from
   the metastat -p output as I intended to recreate those mirrors
   manually once the data disks had been migrated.

7) Run metainit -n -a to verify the syntax of md.tab is correct.

8) Run metainit -a to recreate the metadevices described in md.tab

9) Mount the filesystem and verify that everything looks ok.

10) Just to be safe, unmount the filesystem and fsck it.

11) Remount and metattach the other half of the mirror.

12) Create mirrors for the OS disk as described in the manual.



Original question....

>
> Hi,
>
> This question has been asked before, but I haven't found a complete
> summary for it in the archives.
>
> I have a machine running Solaris 2.6/DiskSuite 4.1 which will soon be
> upgraded Solaris 8/DiskSuite 4.2.1.  We want to do a clean install of
> the new OS, not the upgrade option.  Currently, the OS is on a single
> disk (mirrored) with applications and data on a 3 disk stripe (mirrored
> onto another 3 disk stripe).  All the state database replicas are on
> these last six disks.  I know how to install the new OS and new version
> of DiskSuite and recreate the OS disk mirrors.  I'd like to then be
> able to migrate the existing metadevices for the other 6 disks to the
> new version of DiskSuite without having to recreate them and restore
> the filesystems from backup.
>
> Has anyone successfully migrated older metadevices following a clean
> installation of the OS?  If so how?  Thanks in advance....
>
> Sandy


______________________________________________________________________
Sandy Gordon                                  email:  sagordon@uvic.ca
Unix Systems Administrator                    phone:    (250) 721-8266
University of Victoria Libraries              fax  :    (250) 721-8215