StorEdge Volume Manager is a great product and works very nicely. It is actually a repackaged version of Veritas Volume Manager. The commands are a little arcane. The following shows how to configure an hypothetical layout. The target machine is a E250 with 6 9GB drives. The target configuration is a mirrored root drive, a RAID5 data partition and one spare disk. The drives are named as follows

c0t0d0

Root drive.

c0t8d0

Mirror of root drive.

c0t9d0

c0t10d0

c0t11d0

RAID5 data drives.

c0t12d0

Spare drive.

Install Solaris the usual way and after applying all the patches from the patch cluster and installing Volume Manager, you may then proceed to configuring the volumes.

1. Install the licenses required for running VM. You have to talk to Sun to get the necessary licenses. To do this, run

   % vxinstall

   After entering the licenses, you will now be asked if you want to encapsulate the root drive. If you intend to mirror the root drive, then you should say Y to this. This will be followed by the option to put other disks into Volume Manager at this time.

2. At this point you will want to initialize all the drives and put them under Volume Manager control. To do this, use vxdiskadm, choose option 1 and follow the instructions. We'll call the root mirror rootmirr, the data drives data01, data02, data03 and the spare spare01. Answer yes to the "make this a spare this diskgroup" question to make spare01 available.

3. Next, we'll mirror the root drive. To do that, issue the following commands

   % vxassist mirror rootvol layout=contig,diskalign rootmirr
   % /etc/vx/bin/vxbootsetup -v rootmirr
   % /etc/vx/bin/vxmirror rootvol rootmirr

4. We will then creat the RAID5 partition. Note that the following command will take a while to execute.

   % vxassist make datavol 17250m layout=raid5,nolog data01 data02 data03

5. At this point, you are pretty much done unless you would like to add logging to the RAID5 partition. This is recommended for quick recovery. However you should have made a subdisk for this purpose somewhere.

   Using vxva (PATH=${PATH}:/opt/SUNWvxva/bin; export PATH), create a plex with the target subdisk in it and associate it with datavol. You should then see an additional plex appear in the RAID5 volume.

6. You can check to see if everything is working properly by using vxinfo. vxstat will show disk statistics. This site at Zurich has some additional information that may be useful.

   % vxinfo
   

   datavol        raid5    Started
   rootvol        root     Started
   swapvol        swap     Started
   

   % vxstat
   

                           OPERATIONS           BLOCKS        AVG TIME(ms)
   TYP NAME              READ     WRITE      READ     WRITE   READ  WRITE 
   vol datavol           1861      3649     28562     37112    3.9  161.3 
   vol rootvol           5554     10674    113946    343596   11.3  398.2 
   vol swapvol              0         0         0         0    0.0    0.0