Unix Backup and Recovery

Chapter 7. SunOS/Solaris

As mentioned previously in this book, disks will fail. Occasionally, even the disk that contains the operating system will fail. How do you protect against such a disaster? Depending on your budget and the level of availability that you need, you may explore one or more of the following options if you’re running Solaris:

Solstice Disk Suite mirrored root disk

If you are running Solaris, you can use Solstice Disk Suite (SDS) to mirror your root disk. (Other platforms have similar products.) A mirrored disk would automatically take over if the other disk fails. SDS is bundled free with Solaris, and mirroring the root drive is relatively easy.^[44] It’s also easy to undo in case things get a little mixed up. You simply boot off a CD-ROM, mount the root filesystem from the good drive, and change the /etc/vfstab to use the actual disk slice names instead of the SDS metadevice names. There are two downsides to this method. The first is that many people are using Veritas Volume Manager to manage the rest of their disks, and using SDS for the root disk may be confusing. The second downside is that it does not protect against root filesystem corruption. If someone accidentally overwrites /etc, the mirroring software will only make that mistake more efficient.

Tip

Although this chapter talks mainly about SunOS/Solaris, the principles covered here are used in the other bare-metal recovery chapters.

Veritas Volume Manager encapsulated root disk

If you have purchased the ...