How to buy/borrow MIRRORDISK/UX

[paullfisher]

We have an HP 9000 and we have a short term need for Mirrordisk. How can we go about getting a license for it? Preferabbly a short term one but a permananet one if needs be.

Thanks!

P.S. This thread has been moved from HP 9000 to HP-UX > sysadmin. -HP Forum Moderator

[Jesse Dougherty]

I dont believe you can even buy that from HP anymore. I pulled an old book and these are the prices. Tier-1 is $3,900, Tier-2 is $11,900.00, and Tier-3 is $24,000.00.

You can get around the Mirrordisk software by doing your mirroring through hardware via a RAID card or RAID array. What 9000 do you have? I can tell you what you need to do your hardware mirroring.

Jesse
Cypress Technology Inc

[paullfisher]

The problem is I want to mirror the disks that aren't physically in the 9000. Currently, the data resides on an HP Eva and we want to move the data to our new Netapp.

The easiest way is to create a mirror to the Netapp and then remove the mirror from the Eva.

[Bill Hassell]

Mirroring might be available for HP-UX 11.31but not rented (ie, temporary). Anything earlier than that is very unlikely to be available. Current OS versions (11.11, 11.23 and 11.31) are sold in OE (Operating Environments), which are just bundles of the most useful optional features. The BOE (Basic OE) has no Mirroring.

So without mirroring, you'll have to use dd to copy the physical lvol(s). NOTE: During the copy, the lvols must not be in use, either as filesystems (unmount them to make sure) or raw volumes for databases (stop the database). Create a separate VG for the NetApp, add whatever LUNs you need to match the size of your existing data VGs, then umount and stop the applications. The dd will be rlvol to rlvol which is the fastest way to copy. Make absolutely sure you use bs=1024k or the copies will take hours, maybe days if you're copying lots of GB.

The command would be something like this:

dd if=/dev/vg12/rlvol2 of=/dev/vgnet12/rlvol2 bs=1024k

Repeat for each rlvol. For proff of concept, copy a small lvol with a filesystem. After the copy is finished, manually mount the NetApp lvol and you will see all the files.

[Patrick Wallek]

>>The problem is I want to mirror the disks that aren't physically in the 9000. Currently, the data resides on an HP Eva and we want to move the data to our new Netapp.

Another option for you *might* be to use the 'pvmove' command.  pvmove will move data from one physcial volume to another.  It actually does use mirroring in the background, but it accomplished this without needing to have the MirrorDisk product installed.

I would suggest trying this on small disk or a test system first to make sure it will work for you.

The one caveat with PVMOVE is that you do NOT want to have the process interrupted as cleaning up can be quite painful.