SUMMARY: DISKSUITE not so sweet

Charles Harvey (harvey@nmc8.chinalake.navy.mil)
Thu, 27 Mar 1997 07:46:38 -0800

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  Sean Harvey   OAO Corp  harvey@nmc8.chinalake.navy.mil  
     Ridgecrest CA  (619)939-2199                           
                                                            
     The future masters of technology will have to be         
   lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters  
     the grim and the dumb.  -- Marshall McLuhan,
1969                                                               |
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ORIGINAL QUESTION:

>Dear friends, > >Can I get some feedback from people who have used Disksuite 4.0 Rev 1 >under Solaris 2.5.1 to mirror. > >I tried it and it is very erratic. The metastat command shows that >everything is OK. But it is not consistent. Sometimes if I edit a file, >the mirrored copy gets /dev/nulled. Sometimes the edit copies OK. >Sometimes nothing happens. > >I installed patch 102580-14 and it seemed to make things worse. > >Is this software any good or is it buggy? > >Any input will be appreciated. > >Sean >

I recieved many responses, all positive. The general opinion of these experts who use the Disksuite product for mirroring is that is is a good and reliable product. As for my owm problem: I had left my submirror mounted. I wanted to check and see if the mirror was in fact working. If one wants to check the submirror, I found, one must first umount the metadevice and then mount the submirror. Also, metatool can be very useful.

Thanks for all the replies and tips. Now I too have a high opinion of this product!

Sean

Here are a few of the responses I recieved:

The software is used on many production servers for financial controlling and have had no problems at all, in fact it has saved my arse several times as we trade 24/7 and down time is scheduled 2 months in advance.

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I've installed the disksuite software (versions rom 1.0 through 4.0) many times at many different sites and as far as my experience goes it works very reliably, although you do need the patch.

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We found lots of problems before we installed 102580-13 and 103153-11 (SunOs 5.5) or 103591-04 (SunOs 5.5.1). Since then we have been running mirrored system drives (including swap) plus transaction file systems without problems.

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I'm sure you'll get some similar responses, so here I go. I have disksuite running on three machines. SS20 and 2 ultra's. A simple concat. on two 9gb drives. I assume: 1) drives are of similar geometry. If not you'll lose many MB of space. Performance will be diminished.

2) several replica's were made on different disks and disk partitions.

3) a good newfs was made on the raw md device. and fsck checked out ok.

If all of the above were done then I don't know what could go wrong software wise. Good cables? termintation? cable length?

Hope this helps

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Well, FWIW, I've been testing 4.0 on 2.5 for a little while now and I'm fairly happy with it. No real problems to report. We're about to deploy it to a bunch of systems.

I don't know anything about 4.0 but I installed 4.1 on Sun Ultra 2 running 2.5.1 and it works great ! I have mirrored internal disk (/, /usr, /var, swap) and my Sparc Storage Array is RAID 5 configured. I just followed their examples in Answerbook.

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I used older versions of disksuite under SunOS 4.x and had no trouble using the command line features. I have been using it for over a year on two mission-critical servers running Solaris 2.5.1, but I have only used the GUI tool to do setup and management (metatool). Works great for me. Have you tried using metatool?

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I've used disksuite 4.0 for mirroring and it's been pretty good. We installed the 102580-15 patch. The only issues I saw were when I didn't set the path before starting the GUI but instead started it with ./metatool, so later it hung. Also whenever I mirror a swap partition, it doesn't update vfstab for me, I have to do it manually.

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THANKS TO:

Vasu Vuppala Jason Noorman Kevin.Sheehan Glenn Satchel Steve Phelps David Poore Manjeet Rekhi Pascal Gaudette Justin Young Dean Humphrey Keith Salustro

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