Guide to High Availability: Configuring boot/root/swap

Are you running a busy data warehouse or transaction center that's based on Sun Microsystems hardware and software? Then you're certainly interested in doing all you can to maximize the reliability of your system. In the Guide to High Availability: Configuring boot/root/swap, Jeannie Johnstone Kobert shares a series of specific procedures you can perform to improve the robustness of a system disk.

In her examples, Kobert explicitly covers Sun Ultra 2 workstations, Enterprise 4000 and 5000 servers, A5000 subsystems, and UniPack and MultiPack storage systems. Additionally, the procedures apply to Enterprise 250, 450, 3000, and 6000 servers and all hot-swappable StorEdge products. This book shows how to mirror the system disk (using both Solstice DiskSuite and Enterprise Volume Manager). It shows how to make a system fail over to a mirror of the system disk when there's trouble, and details how to anticipate, detect, and recover from disk failures.

The book leaves little to the imagination, presenting critical information clearly and succinctly. It's easy to follow the author's explicit procedures, which are backed up with screen dumps that show commands and their output. Because of its liberal use of machine input and output, this book is great for studying in advance of "major surgery"--operators will know what to expect from their machines and won't waste time figuring out what output means. --David Wall

Topics covered: System disk mirroring, failure detection and recovery, hot swapping of the system disk, MultiPack and UniPack configuration, and alternate boot paths.