What are soft partitions and how do i create them?

[suran]

What is a soft partition?

Soft partitions allow for a disk to be divided into many partitions that are controlled and maintained by the software used to create those said partitions, thereby removing the limitations of physical partitions (7 in Solaris). A soft partition is made up of one or more extents An extent is the part of the physical disk that makes up the soft partition.


How do I create soft partitions?

Now that you know what a soft partition is, let's look at how we create them under Solaris Volume Manager. For the remainder of this article I will refer to Solaris Volume Manager as SVM

There are 2 methods that can be used to create soft partitions using the metainit command.

1) Specify and unused disk and size using the -e option:

# metainit d0 -p -e c1t0d0 200m

This will create a soft partition of 200MB in size.

2) Specifying an existing slice name and size (most common method)

# metainit d1 -p c1t0d0s0 1g

This will create a soft partition on an existing slice 1GB in size.


This concludes the article on soft partitions. Next we will be looking at mirroring, growing and recovering soft partitions.