Administering disks

 

81

 

 

 

Disk devices

 

 

auto

When the vxconfigd daemon is started, VxVM obtains a list of

 

known disk device addresses from the operating system and

 

configures disk access records for them automatically.

Auto-configured disks (with disk access type auto) support the following disk formats:

cdsdisk

The disk is formatted as a Cross-platform Data Sharing (CDS)

 

disk that is suitable for moving between different operating

 

systems. This is the default format for disks that are not used

 

to boot the system.Typically, most disks on a system are

 

configured as this disk type. However, it is not a suitable

 

format for boot, root or swap disks, for mirrors or

 

hot-relocation spares of such disks, or for Extensible Firmware

 

Interface (EFI) disks.
hpdiskThe disk is formatted as a simple disk. This format can be

 

applied to disks that are used to boot the system. The disk can

 

be converted to a CDS disk if it was not initialized for use as a

 

boot disk.

See the vxcdsconvert(1M) manual page for information about the utility that you can use to convert disks to the cdsdisk format.

Caution: The CDS disk format is incompatible with EFI disks. If a disk is initialized by VxVM as a CDS disk, the CDS header occupies the portion of the disk where the partition table would usually be located. If you subsequently use a command such as fdisk to create a partition table on a CDS disk, this erases the CDS information and could cause data corruption.

By default, auto-configured non-EFI disks are formatted as cdsdisk disks when they are initialized for use with VxVM. You can change the default format by using the vxdiskadm(1M) command to update the /etc/default/vxdisk defaults file as described in Displaying and changing default disk layout attributes” on page 97. See the vxdisk(1M) manual page for details of the usage of this file, and for more information about disk types and their configuration.

Auto-configured EFI disks are formatted as hpdisk disks by default.