Scenario—Disk Sets

The following example, drawing on the sample system shown in Chapter 5, Configuring and Using Solaris Volume Manager (Scenario), describes how disk sets should be used to manage storage that resides on a SAN (Storage Area Network) fabric.

Assume that the sample system has an additional controller that connects to a fiber switch and SAN storage. Storage on the SAN fabric is unavailable to the system as early in the boot process as other devices, such as SCSI and IDE disks. In addition, Solaris Volume Manager would report logical volumes on the fabric as unavailable at boot. However, by adding the storage to a disk set, and then using the disk set tools to manage the storage, this problem with boot time availability is avoided. Also, the fabric-attached storage can be easily managed within a separate, disk set-controlled, namespace from the local storage.