Dynamic Root Disk (DRD)

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 maintenance and recovery. 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.

Version A.2.0 of DRD is supported on systems running HP-UX 11i Version 3 with an LVM managed root volume. It provides the following functionality:

Hot maintenance capability. The DRD tools can be used to create a clone of the running system, apply patches or install products to the clone, and boot the clone as the running system.
Hot recovery capability. The DRD tools can be used to create a clone and boot it if the running system fails.
Software Distributor (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.

Summary of Change

This is the first release of DRD for HP-UX 11i v3. Until now, it has only been available on HP-UX 11i v2. In addition, since most HP-UX 11i v3 products are already DRD safe, products as well as patches can be installed using DRD.

Impact

This will provide parity with HP-UX 11i v2 for this functionality. This provides more capability than on HP-UX 11i v2, since products as well as patches can be installed using DRD on HP-UX 11i v3.

Compatibility

This is the first release of this product on HP-UX 11i v3, so there are no previous releases to be incompatible with. This release is compatible with the HP-UX 11i v2 release of DRD.

Performance

There are no known performance issues.

Documentation

Manpages are included in the product, which is packaged in the DynRootDisk bundle. The Web site http://docs.hp.com/en/DRD/ includes an overview, white papers, Administrator's Guide, FAQ, and more.

Obsolescence

Not applicable.