Solstice Disk Suite 4.2.1 – Solaris 8

This document details the configuration of Solstice Disk Suite 4.2.1 on a Sun V880 with Solaris 8 2/02 installed. It walks the user through a typical Disk Suite install (mirror the boot disk, stripe & mirror the file systems across the remaining disks). It also covers steps that the Disk Suite documentation leaves out (format, fmthard, and cylinder calculations). The install and configurations are accomplished via the command line and configuration files. In this example, the server only has one controller in its internal disk array. Ideally, file systems should be striped across disks and mirrored across controllers (for performance and redundancy, respectively).

Disk Suite provides the ability to grow boot disk file systems on the fly. It does not give the same flexibility for the remaining disks. They must be formatted with future file systems in mind. The file systems are static once created, as they reside on disk slices. This document divides disk space evenly between the available slices (30 GB disk = 6 X 5 GB slices). A striped file system must reside on at least 2 disks. This makes the smallest file system 10 GB. An alternative would be to purchase Veritas Volume Manager. It encapsulates entire disks, allowing for more granular management.