The SBD utility (sbdutil) allows you to create, find, or view a Novell Cluster Services SBD partition.
IMPORTANT:The cluster SBD partition is not required unless you have shared storage in the cluster.
We recommend that you carve out a LUN/disk of 20 MB in size to use for the SBD. If you mirror the SBD, you need to carve out a separate LUN/disk of equal size to use. Before you begin, each of these small disks must be initialized and marked as shareable for clustering. You can initialize the device by using NSSMU or the Storage plug-in to iManager. The NSS utility called ncsinit is available for initializing a device and setting it to a shared state.
sbdutil [-c|-f|-i|-v] [-s] [-d device] [-d device] [-p partition] [-n cluster_name] sbdutil -c -d device [-s [size]] [-n cluster_name] sbdutil -f [-s] [-n cluster_name] sbdutil -i -p partition [-s] [-n cluster_name] sbdutil -v [-p partition] [-s] [-n cluster_name]
Enter the command at a terminal console prompt as the root user or any other user in admin or ncsgroup.
Create an SBD partition. This option requires at least one device to be specified. You can create a mirrored SBD by supplying more than one device with multiple instances of the -d option.
IMPORTANT:Do not create an SBD partition for a cluster that already has an SBD partition. If you need to re-create the SBD for a cluster, delete its existing SBD first.
To delete an SBD:
Enter cluster down at the server console of one cluster server.
This causes all cluster servers to leave the cluster.
Delete the SBD partition.
You can use nssmu, evmsgui, or other utilities to delete the SBD partition. If the partition is mirrored, delete the RAID device.
Find the SBD partition.
Initialize the SBD partition. If there is information in the sbdutil -v view from old nodes that have been removed from the cluster, you can run sbdutil -i to initialize the view. This can be done without any issues while the cluster is running.
View the SBD partition.
The device where you want to create an SBD partition. You can create a mirrored SBD by supplying more than one device with multiple instances of the -d option. Use the EVMSGUI (or EVMSN or EVMS) tool to find the names of the devices you want to use, and only use the base (leaf) names (such as sdb or mpathd) with the -d option.
Use this partition instead of searching for one.
Use this cluster name instead of getting it from cluster.xml.
Assume the device is a shared disk system instead of checking cluster.xml. An optional partition size (in MB) can also be specified when creating a partition (-c). The default size is 8 MB. Some of the allocated space is used for storing metadata such as the partition table and MBR (master boot record) for the partition.
For an iSCSI SAN, a very small iSCSI device might rarely have uncommon CHS (cylinder-head-sector) geometry values. NSS prefers at least 32 sectors per track. If there are fewer than 32 sectors per track, NSS tools using EVMS can fail to create the partition or to mark the device as shareable. You can use fdisk to check for valid CHS values before you initialize and share the device. If necessary, you can use fdisk to set the sectors for the device (such as /dev/sdx) to 32:
fdisk -H 64 -S 32 /dev/sdx