Cold installation of HPUX 11i

[Jamal Asi]

Currently, I'm running oracle 8.1.7.4 on HPUX 11.00. I'm planning to upgrade to 11.i by cold installing 11i. I have several volume groups that hold R/3 and oracle. If I vgexported those
volume groups, can I vgimport them after the upgrade without any problems? Any comments or suggestions will be appreciated.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Jamal,

Typically - Yes.
I would imagine that you may have to reinstall the Oracle binaries, but if not they would need to be relinked at a minimum.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Pete Randall]

Jamal,

Yes you can import them. The easiest way is to run a "vgexport -p -s -m /tmp/vgXX.map /dev/vgXX" prior to the beginning of your re-install. Then save the map(s) so that you can access them after you've installed. Then, to import, simply do:

mkdir /dev/vgXX
mknod /dev/vgXX/group c 64 0xXX0000
vgimport -s -m /tmp/vgXXmap /dev/vgXX
vgchange -a y /dev/vgXX


Pete

[Steven E. Protter]

Yes you can do it.

I recently did something similar to this after a Disaster Recovery test went wild.

As a failsafe, prior to the upgrade, i also do the following:

down the database.

Use fbackup to back up all the filesystems.

Just being anal.

SEP

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Jamal,

Yes. You shoudl be able to vgimport them if you have map files. There are few ways of creating the map files.

1. Export them with -s option. While importing, you do not need to specify the PVs. System will scan the disks corresponding to the VG and import them.

vgexport -p -v -s -m /tmp/vgxx.map vgxx
copy vgxx.map to another system.

After the cold install, do

mkdir /dev/vgxx
mknod /dev/vgxx/group c 64 0x0?0000 (replace ? with a uniq number)
Copy vgxx.map from the remote system and import the vgs.
vgimport -v -s -m /tmp/vgxx.map vgxx

This is the easiest and the cleaniest way. Issues being - a) if you have many disks in your VGs, it will take a while b) it will not preserve the way PVs were configured in your old system.

2. Use with -f option to capture information about the disks.

vgexport -p -v -m /tmp/vgxx.map -f /tmp/vgxx.disks vgxx

You will need to copy both vgxx.map and vgxx.disks to a remote system.

After the upgrade follow the mkdir and mknod process mentioned above. Copy back vgxx.disks and vgxx.map from the remote system. Edit vgxx.disks and make sure the controller numbers (cx) match. If not, then you will have to modify them. A comparision of ioscan from the old system and ioscan from the new system should tell you. Once this file is fixed, do

vgimport -v -m /tmp/vgxx.map -f /tmp/vgxx.disks vgxx

After vgimport do a 'vgchange -a y vgxx' to activate the volume groups.

So, I suggest you to do the following on the old system for successful imports.

mkdir /tmp/restore
strings /etc/lvmtab > /tmp/restore/lvmtab
cp -Rp /etc/lvmconf /tmp/restore/lvmconf
vgexport -p -v -s -m /tmp/restore/vgxx.s.map vgexport -p -v -m /tmp/restore/vgxx.map -f /tmp/restore/vgxx.disks vgxx
Repeat the above two commands for all the VGs on the system.
ioscan -f > /tmp/restore/ioscan.f.out
ioscan -fnC disks > /tmp/restore/ioscan.disks

Tar up and copy the entire directory to a remote server.

-Sri