Find out where your Sun machine was manufactured and more from the serial number.

This useful (useless?) piece of information which was previously only available in the Field Engineer Handbook is buried down on the Sun System Handbook web site. I used to do field engineering back when I worked for Skrivervik in Norway - the philosophy was that to be a good SunOS/Solaris consultant you had to know the hardware as well. From the serial number you can find out the manufacturing date and plant of your Sun box.

VxVM 3.2 onwards uses extra cylinder for private region/CDS (Common Data Storage).

Depending on which version/patchlevel you have this will either turn out as a 1 cylinder prtvtoc "hole" on your disk or simply a larger private region. Problems can occur when you are upgrading your configuration, re-using old arrays (where disks have the old private region sizes) or if you are using mirroring. Typically the volume manager complains if you are trying to mirror volumes or you are replacing a disk (the newly initialised disk will have a public regions which is 1 cylinder too small).

The best thing is obviously to have all disks use the new format (so reinitialise your disks if your using an array which have been used previously). If you need to use the old layout use vxdisksetup -i c#t#d# old_layout when initialising the disk (see Veritas TechNotes 240959 and 250979).

CDS (Common Data Storage) - I don't know what it is: there really is no proper reference to it on the Veritas web sites or in the index of the 3.5 Administrator's Guide.