Chapter 2

Administering disks

This chapter describes the operations for managing disks used by the Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM). This includes placing disks under VxVM control, initializing disks, mirroring the root disk, and removing and replacing disks.

Note: Most VxVM commands require superuser or equivalent privileges.

Disks that are controlled by the LVM subsystem cannot be used directly as VxVM disks, but they can be converted so that their volume groups and logical volumes become VxVM disk groups and volumes. For more information on conversion, see the Veritas Volume Manager Migration Guide.

For information about configuring and administering the dynamic multipathing (DMP) feature of VxVM that is used with multiported disk arrays, see Administering dynamic multipathing (DMP)” on page 125.

Disk devices

When performing disk administration, it is important to understand the difference between a disk name and a device name.

When a disk is placed under VxVM control, a VM disk is assigned to it. You can define a symbolic disk name (also known as a disk media name) to refer to a VM disk for the purposes of administration. A disk name can be up to 31 characters long. If you do not assign a disk name, it defaults to diskgroup## where diskgroup is the name of the disk group to which the disk is being added, and ## is a sequence number. Your system may use device names that differ from those given in the examples.

The device name (sometimes referred to as devname or disk access name) defines the name of a disk device as it is known to the operating system. In HP-UX 11i v3, the persistent (agile) forms of such devices are located in the /dev/disk