Solaris disks and Sybase raw devices

When presenting Solaris disks to Sybase as a raw device, it's not possible to use the whole disk (s2), or Sybase will try to overwrite the disk label (disk init will not succeed). Therefore, you need to first edit the partitioning. One way is to bump the predefined slice 6 (usr) by one cylinder in format:

d XX
p
6
[..]
Enter new starting cyl[0]: 1
label
y

You can then proceed to create a metadevice for the disk (on a SAN LUN you would normally create a plain concat) and present /dev/md/rdsk/dXX to Sybase. To avoid downtime next time you need to migrate your LUN to another SAN, a tip is to always wrap concat devices as submirrors of a one way mirror. More on this in another post.

social