Introduction to Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster
Starting with the Solaris 9 9/04 release, Solaris Volume Manager can manage
storage in a Sun Cluster environment using multi-owner disk sets. Multi-owner disk sets allow multiple
nodes to share ownership of a disk set and to simultaneously write to
the shared disks. Previously, shared disk sets were visible from all participating hosts
in the disk set, but only one host could access it at a
time. Multi-owner disk sets work with Sun Cluster and with applications such
as Oracle Real Application Clusters.
Multi-owner disk sets and Solaris Volume Manager shared disk sets can coexist on
the same node. However, moving disk sets between the two configurations is not
supported.
Note - Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster device id support for multi-owner disk
sets is not available. Therefore, importing multi-owner disk sets from one system to
another is not supported at this time.
Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster creates the same components that you
can create with Solaris Volume Manager, including stripes, concatenations, mirrors, soft partitions, and
hot spares. Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster does not support RAID-5 volumes
and transactional volumes.
The following figure shows the association between the software and the shared storage
in a typical cluster configuration.
Figure 4-1 Sample Cluster Configuration
Each node has local storage as well as at least one path
to shared storage. The multi-owner disk sets in the cluster are managed by
Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster, which is part of the Solaris Operating
System (Solaris OS).
Prerequisite: Required Software Components for Multi-Owner Disk Set Functionality
To use Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster, the following software must
be installed in addition to the Solaris OS:
Sun Cluster initial cluster framework
Sun Cluster Support for Oracle Real Application Clusters software
Oracle Real Application Clusters software
Note - For information on setting up Sun Cluster and Oracle Real Application Clusters software,
see Sun Cluster Software Installation Guide for Solaris OS and Sun Cluster Data Service for Oracle Real Application Clusters Guide for Solaris OS.
