The Sun Cluster software uses global devices to provide cluster-wide, highly available access to any device in a cluster, from any node, without regard to where the device is physically attached. In general, if a node fails while providing access to a global device, the Sun Cluster software automatically discovers another path to the device. The Sun Cluster software then redirects the access to that path. Sun Cluster global devices include disks, CD-ROMs, and tapes. However, the only multiported global devices that Sun Cluster software supports are disks. Consequently, CD-ROM and tape devices are not currently highly available devices. The local disks on each server are also not multiported, and thus are not highly available devices.
The cluster automatically assigns unique IDs to each disk, CD-ROM, and tape device in the cluster. This assignment enables consistent access to each device from any node in the cluster. The global device namespace is held in the /dev/global directory. See Global Namespace for more information.
Multiported global devices provide more than one path to a device. Because multihost disks are part of a device group that is hosted by more than one node, the multihost disks are made highly available.
The Sun Cluster software manages global devices through a construct known as the DID pseudo driver. This driver is used to automatically assign unique IDs to every device in the cluster, including multihost disks, tape drives, and CD-ROMs.
The DID pseudo driver is an integral part of the global device access feature of the cluster. The DID driver probes all nodes of the cluster and builds a list of unique devices, assigns each device a unique major and a minor number that are consistent on all nodes of the cluster. Access to the global devices is performed by using the unique device ID instead of the traditional Solaris device IDs, such as c0t0d0 for a disk.
This approach ensures that any application that accesses disks (such as a volume manager or applications that use raw devices) uses a consistent path across the cluster. This consistency is especially important for multihost disks, because the local major and minor numbers for each device can vary from node to node, thus changing the Solaris device naming conventions as well. For example, Node1 might identify a multihost disk as c1t2d0, and Node2 might identify the same disk completely differently, as c3t2d0. The DID driver assigns a global name, such as d10, that the nodes use instead, giving each node a consistent mapping to the multihost disk.
You update and administer device IDs with the cldevice command. See the cldevice(1CL) man page.