This article describes how to replace disks in a Solaris Volume Manager environment. I use a real case happened on Sun Fire 4540 server, c0t0, one of the system disk failed. I've been used to use script to capture the screen output during the disk replacement, quite useful.

Step #1  identify the failed disk 

        a. Alert from ILOM SNMP

        b. Our own daily raid monitoring script

        c. you can also identify the failed disk by examining the /var/adm/messages file and the metastat command output

        d. or fmadm faulty

Step #2 Locate any state database replicas that might have been placed on the failed disk.

The output shows three state database replicas on each slice 6 of the local disks, c0t0d0 and c1t0d0. The W in the flags field of the c0t0d0s6 slice indicates that the device has write errors. Three replicas on the c1t0d0s6 slice are still good.

Step #3 Record the slice name where the state database replicas reside and the number of state database replicas. Then, delete the state database replicas(If you also like using script to capture you screen output, then it's easy).

        You can see that the state replicase on c0t0d0 are gone

Step #4 Replace the failed disk(If you have hot spares on the failed disk, remove them first by using 'metahs -d', I don't have in my case).

Step #5 Repartition the new disk.

I used the good disk's partition table to create the second one's

Now, time to create state database replicas on newly replaced disks

Step #6 run the metareplace -e command for each slice to rsync data to new slices.

Note: If you have any soft partitions are built directly on slices on the replaced disk, run the metarecover -m -p command on each slice that contains soft partitions. This command regenerates the extent headers on disk. it is not my case.