LDOM: Solaris 10 and 11 supported configuration differences

LDOMs known as Oracle VM Server for Sparc provides a Solaris feature called MPGROUPs.

Various different configuration are supported with the Veritas product suite and this document summarizes those key differences.

Figure 1.0

MPGROUPs remains unsupported for Solaris 11 configurations

MPxIO is not supported with Solaris 10 or 11 LDOM configurations

Solais 10 & 11 Configuration differences

For Solaris 11 based GUESTs, the use of MPGROUPs is not supported in any capacity or configuration.

The I/O Domains can run different Veritas InfoScale product versions to the LDOM Guests. In addition, the Solaris version can also be different Solaris 11 and Solaris 10.

Example

The Primary & Secondary (Alternate) I/O domains can run Veritas InfoScale 7.4.2, whilst the Solaris 10 LDOM Guest may have InfoScale 7.1 installed.

See Article: Veritas SCSI-3 Fencing disks are not supported with Solaris 10 LDOM Guest with or without Solaris MPGROUPs


Solaris 11.3 Enhancement

Oracle released an interoperability enhancement for Solaris 11.3 with SRU 18.0.6 and higher. This interoperability enhancement enabled Veritas Dynamic Multi-pathing (DMP) to better handle the loss of Primary (Control) and Service I/O Domains. Oracle decided not to backport this functionality to Solaris 10 at this time.

The recommendation from Veritas is deploy Solaris 11 based GUESTs where possible to overcome this interoperability limitation, and take benefit from the enhanced operating system enhancements.

Summary Table

Key Points:

Solaris 10:

1. The ZFS boot disk should only be managed by MPGROUPs with Solaris 10 GUEST deployments

2. Veritas is recommending the deployment of Veritas DMP exported backend devices into a MPGROUP, which is then finally made visible into the Veritas 10 GUEST

3. For Solaris 10 GUEST environments only, where Veritas CVM/CFS is used, it is recommended that MPGROUPs not be used for data disks

4. Do not enable dmp_native_support enable in Solaris 10 based GUEST, especially for ZFS rpool devices

NOTE: Possible to configure a MIX of DMP and MPGROUP

Solaris 11:

1. With Solaris 11 the boot disk must NOT be configured in connection with MPGROUPs

2. For data disks presented to Solaris 11 GUESTs, MPGROUPs must not be used

3. The vdc.conf parameter timeout-noretry-list must be defined in he GUEST domains - Example: timeout-noretry-list=0,1,2,3,4,5;

4. The DMP tunable dmp_native_support must be enabled in GUEST domains

NOTE: Only DMP can be used, no MPGROUPs.