Solved: How to create hardware RAID in Solaris

If you want to create hardware RAID in Solaris you can use raidctl utility.

• Let’s create a mirrored RAID volume. Before you start remember that raidctl will destroy all data on the disk so be absolutely sure that you selected right disks.

# raidctl -c c0t0d0 c0t1d0Creating RAID volume c0t0d0 will destroy all data on member disks, proceed (yes/no)? yes...Volume c0t0d0 is created successfully!#

• Once you have created the RAID it can be in four below states:-

OPTIMAL – Disks in RAID are online and fully synchronized.
SYNC – Disks syncing is in progress.
DEGRADED – Shows that one of the disk in RAID is failed.
FAILED – When one or both disks are lost and you have to recreate the volume.

• Let’s check the current status of our volume.

# raidctl -l c0t0d0Volume            Size     Stripe     Status    Cache     RAID       Sub                 Size                           Level            Disk----------------------------------------------------------------c0t0d0            136.6G   N/A        SYNC       OFF      RAID1            0.0.0 136.6G              GOOD            0.1.0 136.6G              GOOD

• In the above output we can see that the sync is going on. While in below output we can see that disks are in sync now and RAID is optimal. Also we can see that it’s RAID 1 which is mirroring.

# raidctl -l c0t0d0Volume            Size     Stripe     Status    Cache     RAID       Sub                 Size                           Level            Disk----------------------------------------------------------------c0t0d0            136.6G   N/A        OPTIMAL   OFF      RAID1            0.0.0 136.6G              GOOD            0.1.0 136.6G              GOOD

If you want to change the system board of a system with hardware RAID, you will have to reactivate the volumes after hardware replacement. Refer to the post,  steps to follow for hardware replacement and reactivate hardware .