Local and Multihost Disks in a Sun Cluster Environment

Two sets of storage arrays reside within a cluster: local disks and multihost disks.

• Local disks are directly connected to a single node and hold the Solaris operating environment for each node.

• Multihost disks are connected to more than one node and hold client application data and other files that need to be accessed from multiple nodes.

For more conceptual information on multihost disks and local disks, see Sun Cluster concepts documentation.

Removable Media in a Sun Cluster Environment

Removable media include tape and CD-ROM drives, which are local devices. Sun Cluster 3.x Hardware Administration Manual does not contain procedures for adding, removing, or replacing removable media as highly available storage arrays. Although tape and CD-ROM drives are global devices, these drives do not have more than one port and do not have multi-initiator firmware support that would enable these devices as highly available. Thus, Sun Cluster 3.x Hardware Administration Manual focuses on disk drives as global devices.

Although tape and CD-ROM drives cannot be highly available at this time, in a cluster environment, you can access tape and CD-ROM drives that are not local to your system. All the various density extensions (such as h, b, l, n, and u) are mapped so that the tape drive can be accessed from any node in the cluster.

Install, remove, replace, and use tape and CD-ROM drives as you would in a noncluster environment. For procedures about how to install, remove, and replace tape and CD-ROM drives, see the documentation that shipped with your hardware.

SAN Solutions in a Sun Cluster Environment

You cannot have a single point of failure in a SAN configuration that is in a Sun Cluster environment. For information on how to install and configure a SAN configuration, see your SAN documentation.