Does anyone know any good book(s) on learning the ins and outs of Solaris's SDS (Solaris Disk Suite) and its corresponding commands (metastat, metadb, meta*)? I'm looking to invest some time into this for work.
1 Answer
I can recommend the book "Boot-Disk-Management-Microsystems-Resource" by John S. Howard:
It covers both DiskSuite and Veritas.
SDS was renamed Solaris Volume Manager, the Oracle documentation in the administrator guides is also well worth reading:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E18752_01/html/816-4520/index.html
It's worth piking up an old Sun Ultra with 2 x SCSI disks from ebay to learn disksuite. That way you can do the mirroring, splitting, patching, booting from each side without fear of breaking anything.
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SVM isn't so difficult or powerful that you should need a book on it. The docs on oracle.com should suffice. Also, if you don't know SVM well by now, you might as well just spend a little time getting to know it and then skip straight over to ZFS and if you're so inclined, VxFS. To add, why go to the expense of housing and running additional hardware when a small virtual machine (or multiples) on your computing device of choice should be more than enough to learn on. Aug 5, 2011 at 9:35
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Nothing wrong with VM's but they are intel based. Buying a cheap Sparc server lets you get familiar with the eeprom settings for the disks. I've seen a lot of those not set or wrong. There are also lots of legacy sites out there still running 2.5.1, 2.6, 7 and 8 of Solaris on sparc.– gm3dmoAug 5, 2011 at 11:14
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yeah, but the OP said SVM, not OBP or forth. A VM would suit to learn the software. Just offered up another option, I didn't say you were wrong... Aug 5, 2011 at 14:05
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@davey: If I were go the hardware route, for testing and such to learn SVM, would I have to buy a Sun Ultra (SPRAC proc)? ... Or could I just use an intel-based processor with Solaris 10 installed and two hard drives? I'm asking because I was thinking I could use a VM to test this if that was the case. I am only doing this for testing purposes as I've been introduced to metastat and metadb related function, and need to be able to manage these types of systems. They were implementated this way, weather I like it or not. Aug 5, 2011 at 23:24
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VM for intel is fine for learning the software side. If the productions systems that you manage are Sparc then the reason I recommend you get access to a test Sparc system to become familiar with commands like
probe-scsi-all
and the items here dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/SYSADV1/ggkuh.html. It's important that a sysadmin be practiced with these commands because when a machine goes down, I can recover quicker because I am not interacting with the OBP for the first time in a critical situation.– gm3dmoAug 6, 2011 at 8:01