Coming in Build 37 of Nevada is the ability to use descriptive names for metadevices and hot spare pools in Solaris Volume Manager (SVM). Ever since it's inception as Online Disksuite, the code that we now call SVM has been very restrictive about what you can call the metadevices. Metadevices had to be called dx, where x was an interger between 0 and 8191. Hot spare pools had to be named hspnnn where n was a 3 digit number between 001 and 999.

With the putback of the Bunnahabhain project into snv_37, you can use a much richer set of names for metadevices and hot spare pools. The names can now consist of alphanumeric characters plus -, _ ..

For example, let's create some metadevices for the engineering department. We'll create a two sided mirror called engr. This example assumes that you already have the required metadbs in place. First, we'll create the two submirrors:

metainit engr-1 1 2 c1t1d0s0 c1t2d0s0
metainit engr-2 1 2 c1t3d0s0 c1t4d0s0

We now have two metadevices, called engr-1 and engr-2. These are more descriptive names than d1 and d2.

Now let's create the mirror and attach the second side.

metainit engr -m engr-1
metattach engr engr-2

The output of metastat -c shows:

engr             m  4.1GB engr-1 engr-2
    engr-1       s  4.1GB c1t1d0s0 c1t2d0s0
    engr-2       s  4.1GB c1t3d0s0 c1t4d0s0

Now let's create a hot spare pool called engr-hsp and attach it to the stripes:

metahs -a engr-hsp c1t5d0s0
metaparam -h engr-hsp engr-1
metaparam -h engr-hsp engr-2

Now, metastat -c shows:

engr             m  4.1GB engr-1 engr-2
    engr-1       s  4.1GB c1t1d0s0 c1t2d0s0
    engr-2       s  4.1GB c1t3d0s0 c1t4d0s0
engr-hsp         h      - c1t5d0s0

Finally, we can create some soft paritions for the engineering departments.

metainit chemical -p engr 1gb
metainit electrical -p engr 1gb
metainit mechanical -p engr 1gb

Once again metastat -c shows:

mechanical       p  1.0GB engr
electrical       p  1.0GB engr
chemical         p  1.0GB engr
    engr         m  4.1GB engr-1 engr-2
        engr-1   s  4.1GB c1t1d0s0 c1t2d0s0
        engr-2   s  4.1GB c1t3d0s0 c1t4d0s0
engr-hsp         h      - c1t5d0s0

The SVM team always names their projects after single malt Scotches, and this project was named Bunnahabhain. The members of the team in alphabetical order were:

• Huajian Luo
• Andre Molyneux
• Sanjay Nadkarni
• Tony Nguyen
• Steve Peng (team lead)
• Harold Shaw (team lead)
• Sean Ye
• Victor Hu
• Tom Whitten