HP Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 -UX 11i v3 manual Third-party driver coexistence

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Administering disks

Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices

Adding support for a new disk array

The following example illustrates how to add support for a new disk array named vrtsda to an HP-UX system using a vendor-supplied package on a mounted CD-ROM:

#swinstall -s /cdrom vrtsda

The new disk array does not need to be already connected to the system when the package is installed. If any of the disks in the new disk array are subsequently connected, first run the ioscan command, and then run either the vxdisk scandisks or the vxdctl enable command to include the devices in the VxVM device list.

Enabling discovery of new devices

To have VxVM discover a new disk array, use the following command:

#vxdctl enable

This command scans all of the disk devices and their attributes, updates the VxVM device list, and reconfigures DMP with the new device database. There is no need to reboot the host.

Note: This command ensures that dynamic multipathing is set up correctly on the array. Otherwise, VxVM treats the independent paths to the disks as separate devices, which can result in data corruption.

Removing support for a disk array

To remove support for the vrtsda disk array, use the following command:

#swremove vrtsda

If the arrays remain physically connected to the host after support has been removed, they are listed in the OTHER_DISKS category, and the volumes remain available.

Third-party driver coexistence

The third-party driver (TPD) coexistence feature of VxVM allows I/O that is controlled by third-party multipathing drivers to bypass DMP while retaining the monitoring capabilities of DMP. Provided that a suitable ASL is available, devices that use TPDs can be discovered without requiring you to set up a specification file, or to run a special command. In previous releases, VxVM only supported TPD coexistence if the code of the third-party driver was intrusively modified. The new TPD coexistence feature maintains backward compatibility with such methods, but it also permits coexistence without require any change in a third-party multipathing driver.