Storage Management in Solaris 10

In our last issue we discussed how to manage users, groups and rights in Solaris 10. Continuing this series further, we will walk you through its storage management features this time. In Solaris 10, you have what's called the Solaris Volume Manager, which takes care of configuring and managing large number of disk storage as well as the data on disks. Before using the Volume Manager, we'll first look at what all it's capable of doing. 

Solaris Volume Manager's capabilities

The Solaris Volume Manager allows you to increase storage capacity, data availability and ease the administration of large storage devices. In addition, it can improve the I/O performance. The application uses virtual disks in-order to manage the physical disks connected inside the machine. These virtual disks are known as volumes in Solaris. Functionally, these volumes are identical to a physical disk. The Solaris Volume Manager converts the I/O requests directed at the volume into an I/O request to the underlying physical disks. 

There are five key features in the Volume Manager-RAID, Soft Partitioning, State Database, Hot-spare Pool and Disk Set. In RAID, it supports levels 0 to 5. Soft Partitioning is a subdivision of physical slices or logical volumes to provide smaller, more manageable storage units and ease of managing large storage volumes. The State Database contains the configuration and status information of all volumes, hot spares, and disk sets. This helps administrators manage and diagnose the health of the entire storage on Solaris. Hot-spare Pool is a collection of slices reserved for Raid level 1 and 5. It improves the data availability in both the above mentioned raid levels. The Disk Set feature is a set of shared disk drives in separate namespace that contains volumes and hot spares, and shares non-concurrently by multiple users. It provides redundancy and data availability with easy administration. 

Using Solaris Volume Manager 



To use Solaris Volume Manager, log in to the Solaris 10 GUI console and open a terminal window and issue:

#/usr/sbin/smc 

Solaris Volume Manager allows you to create virtual disk as volumes and also lets you manage them seamlessly

This will open a Java-based Solaris Management Console on your screen. The interface provides a graphical view of Solaris 



Volume Manager Components; including volumes, hot spare pools, and state database replicas. This interface offers wizard-based
manipulation of Solaris Volume Manager Components, enabling you to quickly configure your disks or change an existing storage configuration. In order to use this, go to its left-panel window (Navigation). Click on 'This Computer'>Storage>'Enhanced Storage'. It will ask you the root password to access. Under this you will see the following icons, which will allow you to create Volumes, Soft disk and Hot-spare Pool. Plus the State Database feature will constantly keep an eye on the entire storage. The Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console presents you with a view of all the existing volumes. And to create the volumes, you just need to follow the steps in the wizard, which will easily build any kind of Solaris Volume Manager

Volume or component. You can also build and modify volumes by using Solaris Volume Manager command-line utilities.

So enjoy reading till we bring in more of Solaris for you in the next issue.

Sanjay Majumder