Dynamic Root Disk Frequently Asked Questions HP Part Number: 5900-3041 Published: March 2013 Edition: 1.
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Contents About This Document.....................................................................................4 Intended Audience....................................................................................................................4 Related Documents...................................................................................................................4 Publishing History..............................................................................................................
About This Document This document includes frequently asked questions about Dynamic Root Disk. Intended Audience This document is intended for system and network administrators responsible for installing, configuring, and managing HP-UX servers and workstations. Administrators are assumed to have an in-depth knowledge of HP-UX operating system concepts, commands, and configuration.
This list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) is created by the DRD engineering team. These FAQs are compiled periodically as input dictates. We invite your questions! If you have questions, contact HP Support at 1 (800) 633-3600. Dynamic Root Disk FAQ categories are as follows: » 1. General » 2. Using Dynamic Root Disk Commands » 3. Troubleshooting Dynamic Root Disk Frequently Asked Questions 1- General 1-1. What is DRD? 1-2. What HP-UX releases will DRD run on? 1-3.
1-23 What are the DRD considerations for legacy Device Special Files (DSFs)? 1-24 Does DRD Support SoftReboot feature? 1-1. Q: What is DRD? A: Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) is an HP-UX system administration toolset that lets you create and modify an inactive system image without shutting down the system. To do this, you can clone the active system image and modify the cloned (inactive) system image while the system is running. When ready, you can boot the cloned image.
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.
disk? A: Yes, for this release of DRD, the target disk must be a single disk. top 1-9. Q: What if the DRD contains more than one disk? Does DRD handle this? A: Currently, the target disk must be a single physical disk, or SAN LUN, large enough to hold all of the root volume file systems. This allows a customer to clone the root volume group even if it is spread across multiple disks. Note that this is a one-way, many-to-one operation. top 1-10.
even though vpmon is still up and running. The running vpmon maintains the master copy of the vPar database in memory. This data is synchronized with each running vPars local copy of /stand/vpdb. When vpmon is booted, the local /stand/vpdb is loaded into memory and serves as the master copy.
A: The volume group will be vg00 when the clone is booted. It will have a different minor number than the original vg00. top 1-15. Q: How is lvmtab adjusted to reflect the new device name for the disk in vg00? A: The copy of lvmtab on the cloned image is modified by the clone operation to contain information that will reflect the desired volume groups when the clone is booted. top 1-16.
to the clone will affect performance of I/O on the booted system. DRD's performance is similar to system performance when using Ignite to create recovery images, which many system administrators find acceptable. top 1-21. Q: IgniteUX offers net and tape images.
inactive system image for each runcmd execution? 2-5. Does the DRD clone operation verify that the target is not in use or part of another VG? Once the root disk is cloned, is there anything in the operating system that prevents the non-active target from being reused? How can inactive targets be identified? 2-6. Can I vgimport the target disk as /dev/vgtmp? 2-7. Can DRD show whether DRD is configured or not configured? 2-8.
Where path_to_block_DSF is of the form: • • HP-UX 11i v2: /dev/disk/cXtXdX HP-UX 11i v3: /dev/disk/diskX The preview operation includes the disk space analysis needed to see if the target disk is sufficiently large. top 2-4.
drd runcmd swverify \* top 2-8. Q: Some processes in DRD, particularly drd clone and drd runcmd, take a significant amount of time. Can these processes be interrupted? A: All DRD processes, including drd clone and drd runcmd, can be safely interrupted issuing Control/C (SIGINT) from the controlling terminal or by issuing kill HUP (SIGHUP). This action causes DRD to abort processing and perform any necessary clean up.
• • Make available information from the swagent.log files stored in depots (for example, /var/spool/sw/swagent.log). The swagent daemon creates these when it reads or writes from a depot containing information written by swagent. Depots at other locations have a similarswagent.log. If you are troubleshooting a problem with drd runcmd, you may also want to consult the contents of the logfiles on the inactive system image located at: /var/opt/drd/mnts/sysimage_001/var/adm/sw/sw*.
DRD because it is cloning a fresh volume group. fbackup can fail if files are changing during the fbackup operation, but this is more common with spool files and log files. If you are concerned, use the drd runcmd swverify \* command to check the integrity of the clone after it is created. top 3-7. Q: What happens with the configuration scripts if I install patch A and later install patch B, which then supersedes patch A? A: If you install both Patch A and Patch B before booting, only Patch B is configured.
