Chapter 4

Creating and administering disk groups

This chapter describes how to create and manage disk groups. Disk groups are named collections of disks that share a common configuration. Volumes are created within a disk group and are restricted to using disks within that disk group.

Note: In releases of Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) prior to 4.0, a system installed with VxVM was configured with a default disk group, rootdg, that had to contain at least one disk. By default, operations were directed to the rootdg disk group. From release 4.0 onward, VxVM can function without any disk group having been configured. Only when the first disk is placed under VxVM control must a disk group be configured. There is no longer a requirement that you name any disk group rootdg, and any disk group that is named rootdg has no special properties because of this name. See Specifying a disk group to commands” on page 167 for more information about using disk group names that are reserved for special purposes.

Additionally, prior to VxVM 4.0, some commands such as vxdisk were able to deduce the disk group if the name of an object was uniquely defined in one disk group among all the imported disk groups. Resolution of a disk group in this way is no longer supported for any command.

For a discussion of disk groups that are compatible with the Cross-platform Data Sharing (CDS) feature of Veritas Volume Manager, see the Veritas Storage Foundation Cross-Platform Data Sharing Administrator’s Guide. The CDS feature allows you to move VxVM disks and objects between machines that are running under different operating systems.