Storix Software SBAdmin Solaris System Recovery Guide - Manual (Page 41)

You may change any of the options shown. The Size of the slice can be set by either entering the number
of sectors (512-bytes each) or by entering the number of megabytes. In either case, the other will be
adjusted accordingly.
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Position: This option indicates the position on the disk that this slice will be created. Solaris slices are
numbered from 0 to 15, with certain reserved slice numbers, based on the operating system version
and platform type. The first slice on the disk (position 1) may, for example, be used by slice 5.
Changing this option allows you to simply move slices from one part of the disk to another. If you
change this to a number which is already in use, the slices at the selected position and all that follow
will be moved after this slice.
•
Option: This is either Create Only, indicating that the disk will be created but no raw backup data is
restored to it, Create/Restore indicating that the previous raw slice data included on the backup should
be restored, or Delete to delete this slice. The option to Create/Restore will only appear if you included
raw slice data on your system backup and raw data (i.e. non-filesystem, ZVM or ZFS) from this slice
was included.
When finished with your selections, press F3 or ESC to return to the Change Slice Table options.
Solaris Volume Manager
The Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) provides the flexibility of logically managing multiple physical disks as
one or more logical disk, called meta-devices (also referred to as meta-disks, MD devices, and multi-disks).
This allows, for instance, a filesystem to be spread sequentially across multiple disks, striped across disks.
Therefore, a filesystem created on a meta-device does not have to use contiguous segments of disk space.
Therefore, you can expand and reduce the size of these containers even if there is not contiguous disk space
available. Since SVM support in SBAdmin is quite extensive, we’ll provide a quick lesson in SVM terminology,
but you should refer to your SVM documentation for details:
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Meta-device: This is the common term for devices created using SVM. A meta-device is a device name
starting with a “d” and followed by a number from 0 to 128 (i.e. “d0”). The meta-device will be created
using one or more disk slices or other meta-devices.
•
Striped (RAID 0): A striped meta-device writes data to one or more disk stripes or soft partitions (see
below). If only one stripe is used, the meta-device does not differ from its underlying device. Striping
spans the data in small chunks between the underlying disk stripes or soft partitions, providing better
performance by utilizing multiple physical devices to concurrently read and write data.
•
Mirrored (RAID 1): A mirrored meta-device is comprised of 2 or more other meta-devices, typically
striped or soft partitions. By mirroring data, a copy of all data is placed on each of the underlying
devices, thereby protecting data from a failure of an underlying device. The actual writable space is
equal to the size of the smallest underlying device divided by the number of devices.
•
Parity (RAID 5): This type of meta-device is made up of 3 or more disk slices or other soft-partitions
(see below). Data is written to all but one of the devices, and the remaining device writes a parity bit
which aids in recovery if data after a failure of any one of the underlying devices. The actual writable
space is equal to the size of the smallest underlying device minus one.
Storix System Backup Administrator 41 Version 8.2 Solaris System Recovery Guide