Dynamic Root Disk: Quick Start & Best Practices

Introduction

Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) provides customers the ability to clone an HP-UX system image to an

inactive disk, and then:

• Perform system maintenance on the clone while their HP-UX 11i system is online.

• Quickly reboot during off-hours—after the desired changes have been made—significantly reducing

system downtime.

• Utilize the clone for system recovery, if needed.

• Re-host the clone on another system for testing or provisioning purposes—only on VMs or blades

running HP-UX 11i v3 with LVM root volume groups, or on VMs running HP-UX 11i v2 with LVM

root volume groups. See the Exploring DRD Rehosting whitepaper for more details:

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01920363/c01920363.pdf.

• Perform an OE Update on the clone from an older version of HP-UX 11i v3 to HP-UX 11i v3 update

4 or later.

• Automatically synchronize the active image and the clone, eliminating the need to manually update

files on the clone.

This white paper provides an overview of Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) and is divided into 3 major parts:

Quick Start – this section provides an overview of how to install DRD and how to create a clone.

Best Practices – this section provides advice on how to utilize DRD to perform basic tasks such as

maintenance, updates, recovery and provisioning.

Special Considerations for All Best Practices – this section provides detailed information about

processes you might want to use in many of the best practice scenarios.

Quick Start

Installing DRD

The Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) product is contained in the DynRootDisk bundle. DRD is supported

on systems—including hard partitions (nPars), virtual partitions (vPars), and Integrity Virtual

Machines—running the following operating systems:

• HP-UX 11i v2 (11.23) September 2004 or later

• HP-UX 11i v3 (11.31)

DRD, together with any dependencies, can be installed from the Operating Environment or

Application Software media for HP-UX 11i v2 or 11i v3. Alternatively, DRD and any dependencies

can be downloaded from the DRD website:

http://www.hp.com/go/DRD. Note that the website will

always have the most up-to-date version of DRD.

To determine definitively if your installation of DRD will require a reboot, preview the swinstall

installation and check if any kernel patches are included in the selection at the end of the

swinstall’s analysis phase.