256Creating volumes

Creating a RAID-5 volume

See Specifying ordered allocation of storage to volumes” on page 245 for a description of other ways in which you can control how volumes are laid out on the specified storage.

Creating a RAID-5 volume

Note: VxVM supports this feature for private disk groups, but not for shareable disk groups in a cluster environment.

A RAID-5 volume requires space to be available on at least as many disks in the disk group as the number of columns in the volume. Additional disks may be required for any RAID-5 logs that are created.

You need a full license to use this feature.

You can create RAID-5 volumes by using either the vxassist command (recommended) or the vxmake command. Both approaches are described below.

A RAID-5 volume contains a RAID-5 data plex that consists of three or more subdisks located on three or more physical disks. Only one RAID-5 data plex can exist per volume. A RAID-5 volume can also contain one or more RAID-5 log plexes, which are used to log information about data and parity being written to the volume. For more information on RAID-5 volumes, see RAID-5 (striping with parity)” on page 45.

Caution: Do not create a RAID-5 volume with more than 8 columns because the volume will be unrecoverable in the event of the failure of more than one disk.

To create a RAID-5 volume, use the following command:

#vxassist [-b] [-g diskgroup] make volume length layout=raid5 \ [ncol=number_of_columns] [stripewidth=size] [nlog=number] \ [loglen=log_length]

For example, to create the RAID-5 volume volraid together with 2 RAID-5 logs in the disk group, mydg, use the following command:

#vxassist -b -g mydg make volraid 10g layout=raid5 nlog=2

This creates a RAID-5 volume with the default stripe unit size on the default number of disks. It also creates two RAID-5 logs rather than the default of one log.

Note: If you require RAID-5 logs, you must use the logdisk attribute to specify the disks to be used for the log plexes.