260Creating volumes

Initializing and starting a volume

The following sample description file defines a volume, db, with two plexes, db-

01 and db-02:

#rty

#name

#options

sd

mydg03-01

disk=mydg03 offset=0 len=10000

sd

mydg03-02

disk=mydg03 offset=25000 len=10480

sd

mydg04-01

disk=mydg04 offset=0 len=8000

sd

mydg04-02

disk=mydg04 offset=15000 len=8000

sd

mydg04-03

disk=mydg04 offset=30000 len=4480

plex

db-01

layout=STRIPE ncolumn=2 stwidth=16k

 

 

sd=mydg03-01:0/0,mydg03-02:0/10000,mydg04-01:1/0,

mydg04-02:1/8000,mydg04-03:1/16000

sd

ramd1-01

disk=ramd1 len=640

 

 

comment=”Hot spot for dbvol

plex

db-02

sd=ramd1-01:40320

vol

db

usetype=gen plex=db-01,db-02

 

 

readpol=prefer prefname=db-02

 

 

comment=”Uses mem1 for hot spot in last 5m

Note: The subdisk definition for plex, db-01, must be specified on a single line.

It is shown here split across two lines because of space constraints.

The first plex, db-01, is striped and has five subdisks on two physical disks, mydg03 and mydg04. The second plex, db-02, is the preferred plex in the mirror, and has one subdisk, ramd1-01, on a volatile memory disk.

For detailed information about how to use vxmake, refer to the vxmake(1M) manual page.

After creating a volume using vxmake, you must initialize it before it can be used. The procedure is described in Initializing and starting a volume created using vxmake” on page 261.

Initializing and starting a volume

If you create a volume using the vxassist command, vxassist initializes and starts the volume automatically unless you specify the attribute init=none.

When creating a volume, you can make it immediately available for use by specifying the -boption to the vxassist command, as shown here:

#vxassist -b [-g diskgroup] make volume length layout=mirror

The -boption makes VxVM carry out any required initialization as a background task. It also greatly speeds up the creation of striped volumes by initializing the columns in parallel.