Dynamic Root Disk Frequently Asked Questions (August 2010)

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1-3. Q: How can I modify the inactive system image without affecting the active system image?
A: By only using DRD commands to modify the inactive system image. DRD commands are specially designed to create the inactive
system image and modify only that image.
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1-4. Q: How can I be sure that the clone is a consistent system if the original system is still active?
A: Choose a time to create the system clone when the booted system is fairly quiet. Note that only the root volume group is cloned, so
application activity on other volume groups will not affect the integrity of the clone. In this release of DRD, the copy operation is done by
fbackup and frecover.
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1-5. Q: What are the DRD commands?
A: The DRD commands are:
drd activate
drd clone
drd deactivate
drd mount
drd rehost
drd runcmd
drd status
drd sync
drd umount
drd unrehost
In addition, the drd runcmd command allows you to run specific Software Distributor (SD) commands on the inactive system image
only. These SD commands are:
swinstall
swremove
swlist
swmodify
swverify
swjob
Two other commands can be executed by the drd runcmd command.
The view command can be used to view logs produced by commands that were executed by drd runcmd.
The kctune command can be used to modify kernel parameters.
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1-6. Q: Are instance numbers changed when the clone is booted?
A: The ioconfig file and the entire /dev directory are copied by the DRD clone operation, so instance numbers will not change when
the clone is booted. (On a system with an LVM root, the LVM information is modified so that the booted volume group is always vg00.
The /dev/vg00 directory is removed from the clone and the /dev/drd00 directory is renamed /dev/vg00.)
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1-7. Q: Can the clone be mirrored?
A: Use the drd clone -x mirror_disk option to mirror the clone when you create it. Also see the Dynamic Root Disk and MirrorDisk/UX
white paper at http://www.hp.com/go/drd-docs
that explains how you can mirror the clone after the clone has been created.
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1-8. Q: I have many disks I would like to clone in one operation. Is the target a single disk?
A: Yes, for this release of DRD, the target disk must be a single disk.