A5000 (and other arrays) best practice which is hardly ever seen - no wonder why!

The Sun manual "Mass Storage Subsystem Best Practices" (806-1949-10) has some useful hints:

• page 6: Do not configure logs for volumes on the same loops as the volumes themselves. Logs can be a bottleneck for a volume, and keeping the log disks separate from the data disks can help prevent performance degradation. A useful little reminder - if you are mirroring and using ufs/vxfs logging the need for logs is greatly reduced though.
• page 35 onwards talks about "Installation Verification and System Validation Recommendations". This is the part which most people leave out (it was not mentioned on my A5000 training and most engineers seem to leave it at a basic connectivity test when installing new hardware). It all boils down to using the Sun StorTools toolkit to do
  1. Installation Verification (4-8 hours):
     1. Software and Firmware Verification: "Check Revisions" (to be done every 3 months)
     2. Physical Configuration Verification: "Create Configuration Snapshot File" and "Display Configuration"
     3. Host Adapter Verification: "Run Diagnostics/Host Adapter Test"
  2. System Validation (at least 48 hours, preferably longer ! here comes the weekend ...):
     1. Loop Integrity Verification: "Diagnostics/Loop Integrity Test" and ""Diagnostics/Disk Read Loop Test"
     2. Load and Stress Disks: "Installation Verification"

I presume the above is related to the X interface version of stortools (possibly even an old version). I could not get this to run (with any of OpenWindows, CDE or Gnome 2.0):

munin# stortools
vtsui: DirectColor is available but not default on this system.
Colormap problems may result.
X Error of failed request:  BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
  Major opcode of failed request:  1 (X_CreateWindow)
  Serial number of failed request:  136
  Current serial number in output stream:  142
munin#

By unsetting the DISPLAY variable (and including /opt/SUNWvtsst/bin in path) I was able to run stortools (got the best results display wise by using dtterm and making sure TERM was set to dtterm). It core dumped halfway through though - but that did not seem to affect the end result after kicking up the tty interface again (the screen actually looks much better - this is not a screenshot; just a html pre statement with a class to emulate a screen) :

***Hostname:munin~~~~Model:"Ultra*Enterprise"~~~~~SunVTS version:4.1~~~~~MP=4***
* start    reset         quit           reprobe     test_mode    tests_select  *
* grouping set_options   option_files   log_files   connect_to   intervention  *
********************************************************************************
*****************Status****************xx**************Test_Groups**************
*           System_status:idle         xx [*] StorEdge   Options               *
*System_passes:1     Total_errors:0    xx                                      *
*         Elapsed_time:000:07:01       xx                                      *
*                         Status_view  xx                                      *
* ***********************************Message********************************** *
*  (munin)Testing completed:  1 pass(es), 0 error(s)                         * *
*  press [ESC] to dismiss                                                    * *
*                                                                            * *
*  *************************************************************************** *
*    sena00_soc0_0            1      0 xx                                      *
*     a5k*ses0_s0(a5ksestest) 1      0 xx                                      *
*     a5k*ses1_s0(a5ksestest) 1      0 xx                                      *
*     c0t0d0*f0(a5ktest)      1      0 xx                                      *
********************************************************************************
*************************************Console************************************
* Connection test complete                                                     *
*                                                                              *
*                                                                              *
********************************************************************************

I have not been able to find an html or pdf version of this best practices manual on the web (sun main website and docs.sun.com) or through searches on google/alltheweb. I suspect that a lot of people have thrown this manual away or not seen it. StorTools can be downloaded from Sun. It is probably a good idea to try StorTools before you have problems instead of after ... I am not to impressed by it; crashing on a freshly patched machine and not being able to launch the X gui does not really build confidence (it has a total bugcount of 334 in SunSolve and there is no patch for 4.2). You can always try to run the tests manually and there's a pdf of the manual in the download package.