[SunHELP] Moving a DiskSuite array

[Phil Stracchino]

OK, folks, here's a couple of questions for y'all.


I have machine A, an Ultra1 running Solaris8, with an attached 711 disk
pack stuffed full of 9G Cheetahs with ...  um, lemmesee ...   five
stripes across them.  I also have machine B, an Ultra30 running
Solaris9.  I would like to detach the 711 from machine A and attach it
to machine B.

Can I do this non-destructively by copying the appropriate lines
from machine A's /etc/lvm/md.cf to machine B?  If this won't work, is
there some other way to move the array non-destruvtively?  Or must I
recreate all the stripes from scratch on machine B after moving the 711,
then restore the data from tape?


On a related subject:  In Linux, if you create two swap partitions of
the same size and assign them the same swap priority, the kernel is smart
enough to automatically (and silently) stripe them for faster swap
performance.  Solaris, I know, does not do so.  Can swap on a Solaris
machine be placed on a stripe metadevice without ill effects?  When I've
tried it, I've seen odd error messages about overlapping swap areas, but
it seemed to work, so I don't know whether this is a serious error or
just a case of the kernel running into something it didn't expect.

(As a side note, when I've discussed this subject elsewhere in the past,
people have said that having swap on a striped device is dangerous if
you lose a disk, but it seems to me that if you lose a disk that has
active swap in use on it, you're in a world of hurt regardless of
whether the swap was striped or not.  So this seems like a specious
argument.  If someone can explain to me why it isn't, please elucidate.)


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