LUNs greater than 1TB size with EFI label not supported in VxVM on Solaris 9

Problem

LUNs greater than 1TB with Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) disk label does not work in Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) on Solaris 9

Error Message

Partial vxdisk list output:

c3t500A09828D51CE14d0 auto - - error 


# prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c3t500A09828D51CE14d0s2
* /dev/rdsk/c3t500A09828D51CE14d0s2 partition map
*
* Dimensions:
* 512 bytes/sector
* 4177526784 sectors
* 4177526717 accessible sectors              <== NOTE: >1TB LUN with EFI label (slice # 8)
*
* Flags:
* 1: unmountable
* 10: read-only
*
* First Sector Last
* Partition Tag Flags Sector Count Sector Mount Directory
0 2 00 34 262144 262177
1 3 01 262178 262144 524321
6 4 00 524322 4176986044 4177510365
8 11 00 4177510366 16384 4177526749

Cause

Excerpt from Storage Foundation (SF) 5.0 MP3 Release Notes:

https://sort.symantec.com/public/documents/sf/5.0MP3/solaris/pdf/sf_notes.pdf

Extensible Firmware Interface support (303294, 834313, Sun Bug ID 6226760)

The Solaris 9 and 10 64-bit kernel Operating Systems provide support for disks larger than 1 terabyte. Disks of this size are formatted with the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) disk label rather than the VTOC disk label. EFI formatted
disks are supported with Veritas Volume Manager only on Solaris 10 (SPARC).

Solution

VxVM running on Solaris 9 does not support EFI labeled disks greater than 1TB size.
Solution is to reduce the size of the LUN to less than 1TB and use SMI label instead.

Applies To

Solaris 9
VxVM 5.0 MP3