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Re: Iam back again :)

 
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Sprint Unix Team
Frequent Advisor

Iam back again :)

When a primary root disk fails..will the system still be up and running with the mirrored root disk OR
the system reboots and comes up with the mirror..

9 REPLIES 9
Craig Rants
Honored Contributor

Re: Iam back again :)

Yes a system should be up with a mirror. Remember mirror disk and alternate boot disk are not necessarily synonymous! You can specify an alternate boot disk if you want that is not your mirror disk.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. " Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
G. Vrijhoeven
Honored Contributor

Re: Iam back again :)

Hi,

The system will keep up and running.
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Iam back again :)

Well, that depends. If you have mirrored all the lvol's on the disk then your box will never know anything bad has happened other than the system monitoring daemons telling you. If you also made both disks bootable and allowed booting without quorum you can reboot
with little intervention. If you have hot-plug or hot-swap disks you can even replace the disk and never stop the server.

Clay
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
Eileen Millen
Trusted Contributor

Re: Iam back again :)

It think this is one of those, it depends questions.
I got this from HP
Start at
http://itrc.hp.com

Click on Maintenance/Support (on the left hand side)
Click on Search Technical Knowledge Base
Login to the ITRC.

Search String: RCFAX* mirror


Hope it is still there.
There are some common misconceptions at the bottom.
Eileen

Uday_S_Ankolekar
Honored Contributor

Re: Iam back again :)

Hi,
System will up and running as I know..
But it 's better to have a script to stale check for logical volume and inform admins.

-USA..
Good Luck..
Darrell Allen
Honored Contributor

Re: Iam back again :)

If you mirror all logical volumes on the root disk the system keeps running. As far as rebooting, you have to set up the "mirror disk" as a boot disk to be able to boot from it regardless of whether or not you've mirrored all the LVs on it.

Darrell
"What, Me Worry?" - Alfred E. Neuman (Mad Magazine)
Sprint Unix Team
Frequent Advisor

Re: Iam back again :)

You are all right..But its a long list of replies..do u guys all want points assigned
;-)
Eileen Millen
Trusted Contributor
Solution

Re: Iam back again :)

The attachement is a message that I got from
HP support.

Eileen
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Iam back again :)

Hi again:

I think I will try to put the 'does the box stay up?' issue in perspective. Understand, that I do mirror each lvol including swap in vg00. I also have the boot strings set to override quorum. Autosearch and Autoboot are enabled. I have enough servers so that in any given year about 6 boot drive failures occur.

Unless the internal drives are hot-plug, I always boot from external drives which are hot-pluggable. The mirrored drives are always on a separate SCSI bus in a separate enclosure with separate power. All of this is basic high-availabilty stuff. Given all those condition, in over 5 years and again with several boot drive failures per year, I have NEVER had a machine go down because of drive failure and have never had to shutdown the server to replace the drives. I keep spare drives on hand
and generally have a boot drives replaced and resynched in just a few minutes.

Food for thought, Clay
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.