Dynamic Root Disk A.3.10.* Release Notes (January 2012)

1. Overview
Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) is an HP-UX system administration toolset used to clone an HP-UX system
image to an inactive disk for software update, maintenance, recovery and rehosting. DRD is
available for download from Software Depot. System administrators use DRD to manage system
images on HP PA-RISC and Itanium® -based systems. DRD complements other parts of your total
HP solution by reducing system downtime while installing and updating patches and other
software.
DRD is supported on HP-UX 11i v2 September 2004 and all subsequent releases of HP-UX 11i
v2. It is also supported on all HP-UX 11i v3 releases. DRD supports LVM or VxVM managed root
volumes
1.1 Product Features
The following features are supported on the most recent release of DRD. Anything labeled as
“new” was added as of the most recent release. New functionality for previous releases can be
seen in the next chapter that details each release.
The most recent release of DRD is supported on HP-UX 11i v2 and HP-UX 11i v3 with an LVM or
a VxVM volume manager. It provides the following functionality:
• Hot maintenance capability. The DRD tools can be used to create a clone of the running
system, apply patches to the clone, and boot the clone as the running system. On 11i v3,
products as well as patches can be installed and managed.
• Hot recovery capability. The DRD tools can be used to create a clone and boot it if the
running system fails.
• SD command support. The DRD tools provide a mechanism for running SD commands
such as swinstall, swremove, swverify, swmodify, swlist, and swjob on the clone.
• Clone accessibility. The clone can be mounted on the running system so that its files can
be viewed or modified.
• Mirror compatibility. The DRD operation will not affect any mirror already created on the
running system. DRD can be used to create a mirror of the clone during the cloning
operation.
• Command line interface. The DRD tools are run from the command line.
• The drd deactivate command was added. This restores primary boot path to the current
active/running system image.
• A rich set of commands for activating and deactivating the inactive system image. This
determines what volume will be used as the root on the next system boot. This includes
options to set the alternate boot disk and the High Availability alternate boot disk.
• Support for LVM 1.0, LVM 2.2, VxVM 4.1, and VxVM 5.0 root volumes. These root
volumes can have any name (not just vg00).
• The drd status command. This allows the user to easily view clone information on the
system. The command specifies the following: which disk the clone resides on; when the
clone was created; the location of the clone's mirror (if one exists); and the original disk
that was copied to create the clone. It also specifies the state of the boot partition on the
clone, mirror, and original disks, as well as which disk is booted and which is activated
(the disk that will be booted from on the next reboot).