Simple mirror question

[Greg Philmon]

Relative HP-UX newbie, more familiar with AIX. I'll be receiving a L2000 (HP-UX 11) next week with two internal drives and some external DS2100 JBOD cabinets attached via a 4si RAID controller.

The plan was to mirror the two internal disks and use them for the root and swap volumes. My question is whether this is possible without buying some sort of additional OS add-on (Mirror/UX or MirrorDisk or whatever)?

HP's software site wants over $1017 per processor for MirrorDisk. I'll buy another DS2100 and boot from there before spending that.

Root-disk mirroring is a pretty basic requirement, so I'm probably just missing something.

TIA!

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Sorry, HP-UX MirrorDisk/UX must be licensed (purchased), although it is worth its cost.

Mirroring in HP-UX is implemented at the logical volume level rather than at the physical disk level.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Ken Hubnik_2]

The only way is to use MIRRORUX from HP.

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Greg,

There is no way to work around that. You need to purchase Mirror/UX for mirroring the root disks and others. Another option is purchase the third-party Veritas Volume Manager (VVM) which you can do more than mirroring (striping, configuring many RAID combinations...)

Hai

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Greg,

AIX has been including mirroring with the OS for years. HP has chosen to sell it (MirrorDisk/UX) separately.

You can pay me now (AIX) or pay me later (HPUX).

Darrell

[Christopher McCray_1 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Here is another, although distant second-place to Mirrordisk/UX, that Mr A. Clay gives in this post:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x206d42308663d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

I strongly echo the JRF's remarks on Mirrordisk, though, but this may come in handy until you decide to spend the dollars on this product.

Good luck,

Chris

[Greg Philmon]

A few wrap-up comments:

1. Thanks for the replies! Geez, but you people are fast!

2. Ouch! This is a disappointment. I'm unpleasantly surprised to discover that the core OS can't mirror volumes. I'd have thought that to be a pretty basic function that just about everyone would want. When budgeting for this equipment, it never even occurred to me that IG??d need to spend $1000s to mirror a $350 disk.

I guess I'll try to carve up the JBODs a bit differently in order to free up a pair of drives I can mirror with the 4si card.

Not sure what I'll do with the two internal drives, though. What do you guys do with non-redundant drives in a system with high-uptime requirements?

[S.K. Chan]

A loooongg time ago, I used to mirror my root drive manually ( I still have the procedure that I still use until today on those systems that does not have MirrorUX ), systems that are not that critical to our business. The only thing with that process is you got to synchronized the disks yourself (ex: launch nightly or weekly from cron). I still think MirrorUX is a must and depending on what your server is going to be used for, you should be able to justify for it. In our environment (on our L-classes), all of our root drives (internal 9GB) are mirrored with MirrorUX and the data resides on 12H AutoRAID which has been setup with redundancy and hotspare.

[Darrell Allen]

Bite the bullet and buy MirrorDisk/UX if you have "high-uptime" requirements.

I can understand that when you're used to having something "free" it's rather difficult to understand why someone else charges for basically the same thing (although we all know the cost of mirroring is simply hidden with AIX).

Sorry,
Darrell