Creating volumes 241

Using vxassist

The section, “Creating a volume on any disk” on page 243 describes the simplest way to create a volume with default attributes. Later sections describe how to create volumes with specific attributes. For example, “Creating a volume on specific disks” on page 244 describes how to control how vxassist uses the available storage space.

Setting default values for vxassist

The default values that the vxassist command uses may be specified in the file /etc/default/vxassist. The defaults listed in this file take effect if you do not override them on the command line, or in an alternate defaults file that you specify using the -doption. A default value specified on the command line always takes precedence. vxassist also has a set of built-in defaults that it uses if it cannot find a value defined elsewhere.

Note: You must create the /etc/default directory and the vxassist default file if these do not already exist on your system.

The format of entries in a defaults file is a list of attribute-value pairs separated by new lines. These attribute-value pairs are the same as those specified as options on the vxassist command line. Refer to the vxassist(1M) manual page for details.

To display the default attributes held in the file /etc/default/vxassist, use the following form of the vxassist command:

#vxassist help showattrsThe following is a sample vxassist defaults file:#By default:#create unmirrored, unstriped volumes#allow allocations to span drives#with RAID-5 create a log, with mirroring don’t create a log

#align allocations on cylinder boundaries layout=nomirror,nostripe,span,nocontig,raid5log,noregionlog, diskalign

#use the fsgen usage type, except when creating RAID-5 volumes usetype=fsgen#allow only root access to a volumemode=u=rw,g=,o=user=rootgroup=root#when mirroring, create two mirrors nmirror=2#for regular striping, by default create between 2 and 8 stripe#columns