Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) formerly called as Online DiskSuite and Solstice Disk Suite (SDS) is a volume manager that comes with the standard installation of Solaris 8, 9, and 10. But soft partition functionality was not included on the first release of SDS on Solaris 8, but it could be added with patch 108693-06 (latest). Upon introduction of Solaris 9, soft partition is included in SVM as one of it’s functionality.

Enough with the long history of SVM, but what is Soft Partition? Soft Partition divides (sub-divides) your partitions which bypasses the limitation of the 7 slices (slice 0 to 7 excluding slice 2) in Solaris Systems.

Here are some tips for usual tasks of a UNIX Administrator:

Checking for available FREE space for our Soft Partition:

root@solaris# metarecover -v -n d6 -p

Create a Soft Partition with 500MB space:

root@solaris# metainit d100 -p d6 500m
root@solaris# newfs /dev/md/rdsk/d100

Expanding an existing Soft Partition:

root@solaris# metattach d100 256m
root@solaris# growfs -M /export/home /dev/md/rdsk/d100

Troubleshooting: If in case you come accross this kind of errors:

d6: On-disk structures invalid or no soft partitions found.

Just recreate its metadata and your good to go!

root@solaris# metarecover d6 -p -m

Removing the soft partition

root@solaris# metaclear d100

Hope these commands could help!