Book Reviews

Boot Disk Management: A Guide for the Solaris Operating Environment

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Boot Disk Management: A Guide for the Solaris Operating Environment
John S. Howard, David Deeths
ISBN 0130621536

Summary

This is a great book for Solaris system administrators or planners. This book offers practical planning advice as well as real world demonstrations on how to configure and maintain Solaris boot disks that ensure minimal outage and recovery effort when a disk fails or when the boot disk is corrupted. This book covers using the VERITAS Volume Manager, Sun Solstice DiskSuite Software and the Sun Live Upgrade software to configure and maintain boot disks.

Details

The first 3 chapters discuss the issues involved in choosing and building a Solaris boot disk. Boot disk partitioning is covered in detail. Swap device recommendations are presented. Upgrading Solaris installations using Live Upgrade is demonstrated. Basic concepts dealing with patches, firmware upgrades and Open Boot Prom maintenance are also covered.

Chapter 4 deals with various configuration scenarios for boot disks. It clearly discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each scenario from a technical and budgeting perspective. Reference configurations are documented, which offers a great framework for customization.

The rest of this book focuses on using VERTIAS Volume Manager and Sun Solstice DiskSuite Software to build robust boot disks environments. Each logical volume manager is given 2 chapters of coverage on the configuration and maintenance of a Solaris boot disk environment. Commands to build the boot disk environments are demonstrated using each LVM.

This book also discusses documentation procedures, boot disk disaster recovery procedures and general boot disk backup procedures. Technical, budgeting and procedural perspectives are used to examine these topics.

I think this is a great book for Solaris administrators of all technical levels. It is also a great reference for Solaris planners to use when building robust Solaris systems.

This book is well worth the money. Any serious Solaris administrator or planner should buy this book and read it.