Administering volume snapshots 351

Creating traditional third-mirror break-off snapshots

Note: Dissociating or removing the snapshot volume loses the advantage of fast resynchronization if FastResync was enabled. If there are no further snapshot plexes available, any subsequent snapshots that you take require another complete copy of the original volume to be made.

Converting a plex into a snapshot plex

Note: The procedure described in this section cannot be used with layered volumes or any volume that has an associated version 20 DCO volume.

It is recommended that the instant snapshot feature is used in preference to the procedure described in this section.

In some circumstances, you may find it more convenient to convert an existing plex in a volume into a snapshot plex rather than running vxassist snapstart. For example, you may want to do this if you are short of disk space for creating the snapshot plex and the volume that you want to snapshot contains more than two plexes.

The procedure can also be used to speed up the creation of a snapshot volume when a mirrored volume is created with more than two plexes and init=active is specified.

Note: It is advisable to retain at least two plexes in a volume to maintain data redundancy.

To convert an existing plex into a snapshot plex for a volume on whichPersistent FastResync is enabled, use the following command:#vxplex [-g diskgroup] -o dcoplex=dcologplex convert \ state=SNAPDONE plex

dcologplex is the name of an existing DCO plex that is to be associated with the new snapshot plex. You can use the vxprint command to find out the name of the DCO volume as described in Adding a version 0 DCO and DCO volume” on page 356.

For example, to make a snapshot plex from the plex trivol-03in the 3-plex volume trivol, you would use the following command:

#vxplex -o dcoplex=trivol_dco-03 convert state=SNAPDONE \ trivol-03

Here the DCO plex trivol_dco_03 is specified as the DCO plex for the new snapshot plex.