SUMMARY: booting off alternate veritas disk

Received a number of suggestions ....

Some folks suggested using DiskSuite on the boot disks, and
Veritas for data. Sun's Live Upgrade was also mentioned. We're
looking at both of the above as things we may switch to.

For the near term, I've have decided to use information found
in a whitepaper at Sun's blueprints site and another publication.

The book: Boot Disk Management - A guide for the Solaris Operating
          Environment. ( Chapter 5 - Configuring a Boot Disk With
          VERITAS VOlume Manager )

The whitepaper: Toward a Reference Configuration for VxVM Managed
                Boot Disks.

The whitepaper is free, the book costs about 40 bucks. Both are
excellent, but the whitepaper includes some stuff that isn't
in the book ....

http://www.sun.com/solutions/blueprints/0800/vxvmref.pdf

Using this strategy, I was able to rather easily split my mirror,
mount the root filesystem at a new mountpoint, and make a few
changes which make the mirror bootable without vxvm ... ( editing
/mountpoint/etc/vfstab ; /mountpoint/etc/system )

The benefit of utilizing this is that I end up with a boot disk
that no longer 'steals' the vxvm private region from swap. The
private region becomes a slice all to itself, and all the volumes
on each side of the mirror align across cylinder boundaries.

An editorial comment: Both Sunsolve and Sun's Blueprints site
are great resources for Veritas Info.

Thanks to:
 Randy Romero
 Darren Dunham
 Jesse Trucks
 Julie Baumler
 Kevin Buterbaugh
 Yura Pismerov
 Ryan Larson
 Jim Southerd
 Steven Potter

cheers,
paul


Original posting:

>   I need a way to boot off the root disks's mirror in the event
>   a software install, or patch install renders a system unbootable.
>
>   According to info at Sunsolve and Veritas support sites, it looks
>   like I need to split the mirrors, then unencapsulate the former
>   mirror ...
>
>   I was wondering how others go about doing this ...
>
>   thanks
>   Paul
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