Meta using sun volume manager

A metavolume (in symmetrix terms) may be shrunk .. However it's NOT suggested (at least from me). If your meta is concatenated, you can shrink it (removing the last symdev, also called meta tail). If it's a striped metavolume, you simply can not shrink it. My beloved customer usually prefers to present another smaller lun to the same host and move data from larger to smaller lun via cpio or something host based. When you moved your data, the old (bigger) metavolume will be available at your wish ..


You have a first limit that is the size of the meta . you can build metas as big as you can, up to 255 members. Total size depends on size of members. Now that you have huge metavolumes you can present them to the host .. And now OS restrictions comes into play



Don't use huge metas. They are a single SCSI queue from the host perspective. Concatenate smaller metavolumes with Sun Volume Manager.
From DMX perspective, huge metas have another bad attitude .. they tend to use multiple times the same physical drive in the backend .. And it's a really BAD habit

-s-

Stefano,

think i should change my id as wishtobeMrStefano ..:))

thanks for the explanation .. here in my env, we only present individual symdevs , not meta symdevs, to the solaris host but the unix admin creates meta using these luns. thus, i would like to know about the complexity of metas in unix perspective. as of now, we dont have veritas volulme manager, thus they use sun volume manager and creating metas to create file systems on metas and assigned for oracle DBs. so my earlier queries actually on unix metas.

please share your thoughts

cheers

this section in SVM admin guide mentions some limitations:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4520/basics-23185?a=view

that would probably be a good question for your unix admins, have they used sun volume manager ? I am assuming we are not talking about ZFS ?

dynamox, no it is not zfs as we are yet to implement solari 10. let me go thru the link you have sent and hope i get info i am looking for. thanks much dynamox for the link

As Dynamox said, it's "sysadmin" question .. here we usually talk about disks and spinning things .. Since SVM doesn't spin at all, we are not allowed to talk about it

However my beloved customer -as I wrote- currently uses SVM and lives happy with it. They use sym-metas and concatenate them via SVM-metavolumes (via metainit/metastat).. I can ask them to share their experience.

Enjoy !!

-s-

PS I'm watching my clock waiting for some funny things from Dynamox or Rob on what you said: "change my id as wishtobeMrStefano "

Dynamox it's too eraly .. I can't yet go to sleep .. I'm still waiting to have dinner .. If you want to boost my ego further, you can

some kids say they want to be fireman when they grow up, some say they want to be astronaut ... but if they ever have the opportunity to meet Stefano ..they will change their mind and say ..."When i grow up i want to be like Mr Stefano"

did i boost your ego ? Can you sleep at night now ?

Wohoooo, it seems I missed this thread..... MrWannebeMrStefano ? No way....