If you use VERITAS Volume Manager (Symantec) to encapsulate the boot disk of a Solaris system, you may see messages like this on boot:

savecore: no dump device configured
dumpadm: no swap devices could be configured as the dump device

Normally on a Solaris system you would run the following command to correct this:

dumpadm -d swap

to indicate that you want to use the swap device as your dump device.  However, on a system with an encapsulated swap partition, you will see the following message from the above command:

dumpadm: no swap devices could be configured as the dump device

The solution for this is to use the underlying device name instead of 'swap' in the dumpadm command.

Determining the swap device name

If you do not already know the device name, you can determine it using this procedure.  First get the Solaris disk name(s) for the swap devices:

vxprint -ht swapvol

You will see output similar to the following:

...
v  swapvol      -            ENABLED  ACTIVE   8389656  ROUND     -        swap
pl swapvol-01   swapvol      ENABLED  ACTIVE   8389656  CONCAT    -        RW
sd rootdg01-01  swapvol-01   rootdg01 45888876 8389656  0         c1t0d0   ENA
pl swapvol-02   swapvol      ENABLED  ACTIVE   8389656  CONCAT    -        RW
sd rootdg02-02  swapvol-02   rootdg02 45888876 8389656  0         c1t1d0   ENA

In the above example, the devices c1t0d0 and c1t1d0 contain sub-mirrors of the swap volume.  To determine the swap partition on each of these devices, use the 'prtvtoc' command for the full pathname for the disk you would like to use as your dump device:

prtvtoc -s /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2

You will see output similar to the following.  Look for the partition with '3' (swap) in the 'Tag' column:

*                          First     Sector    Last
* Partition  Tag  Flags    Sector     Count    Sector  Mount Directory
       0      2    00      66447  45888876  45955322
       1      3    01   45955323   8389656  54344978
       2      5    01          0  71127180  71127179
       3     15    01          0     66447     66446
       4     14    01      66447  71060733  71127179
       6      7    00   54344979  16779312  71124290

This indicates that partition 1 of this disk is used as swap.  So the full pathname of this swap device is:

/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1

Configuring the dump device

To configure the dump device, issue the 'dumpadm' command with the above device:

dumpadm -d /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1

The command should will show output similar to the following:

      Dump content: kernel pages
       Dump device: /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 (dedicated)
Savecore directory: /var/crash/hostname
  Savecore enabled: yes

At this point we are almost done.  The system now knows to use our swap partition as a dump device.  However, if the 'Dump device' line shows 'dedicated' as the device type, savecore is allowed to write to this device at any time, which is a problem since the device is shared with swap.

To correct this, run the following command:

/etc/vx/bin/vxswapctl set /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1

This command marks the device as swap so that savecore will share the device properly.  If you now review your dump configuration:

dumpadm

You should now see the correct configuration:

 Dump content: kernel pages
       Dump device: /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 (swap)
Savecore directory: /var/crash/hostname
  Savecore enabled: yes

with 'swap' now as the 'Dump device' type.