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Jumpstart & Disksuite

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Introduction

Here is a very quick and dirty tutorial on various ways to jumpstart a Solaris system and prepare it with Sun's Online Disk Suite for mirroring of key partitions (/, /var, /usr, /opt and swap).

I have basically two methods covered, the newer method from Sun and a hack started back with Solaris 2.6.

Method 1: From Sun

Newer version of Solaris (Sol 9 9/04 and newer) support the addition of ODS directly from the profile. Since ODS is now available with the standard distribution, Sun had to come up with a way to set everything up during a jumpstart.

This approach works great but it does require that you know ahead of time which disks will be used for mirrors. In this profile excerpt for example, it is mandated that the mirrors will be on controller 1 and will be targets 0 and 1. Hence on a system with only controller 0, this profile would now work.

Here is an extract from a working profile, thanks to Damian Wiest (dmwiest@rc2corp.com):

# Internal disk setup    
filesys mirror:d00 c1t0d0s0 c1t1d0s0  6144 /
filesys mirror:d10 c1t0d0s1 c1t1d0s1  7168 /var
filesys mirror:d30 c1t0d0s3 c1t1d0s3  4096 /opt
filesys mirror:d40 c1t0d0s4 c1t1d0s4  2048 swap
filesys mirror:d60 c1t0d0s6 c1t1d0s6  free /export

# DiskSuite state database replicas 
metadb c1t0d0s5 count 2 
metadb c1t1d0s5 count 2

Method 2: The Hack

Of course, we ran into this problem back at Solaris 2.6 or so and needed a solution before Solaris 9 9/04 so we came up with our own.

This method uses the addition of scripts during the jumpstart who will be invoked, than deleted, the first time the machine boots.