VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide

Chapter 3, Creating Application Volumes

Creating Volumes

Note The storage that is available for allocation is based on the setting of the AutoGrow policy

on a storage pool. If the value of this policy is set to diskgroup and not to pool, all

suitable disks in the disk group are used in the calculation. You can use the -p option to

specify that only storage from the specified pool is to be considered.

For example, the following command returns the maximum possible size of a mirrored volume

with 3 mirrors that can be created in the disk group, mydg, from all the available free storage using

the DataMirroring capability:

# vxvoladm -g mydg maxsize capability=’DataMirroring(nmirs=3)’

The next example checks for the maximum volume size that can be created using prefabricated

mirrors of a specified vendor type:

# vxvoladm -g peakdg maxsize \

volume_template=PrefabricatedDataMirroring \

rules=’confineto "VendorName"="ACME"’

Creating Volumes

To create a volume with a specified length, specify the make keyword to vxvoladm as shown

here:

# vxvoladm [options] make volume length [storage_specification] \

[attribute=value ...]

It is possible to specify a combination of capabilities, templates and rules to this command. Recall

that:

◆ A rule specifies a criterion for choosing and allocating storage.

◆ A template is a meaningful collection of rules that define a capability.

◆ A capability is a high-level description of what a volume can do.

The properties of the volume that is created are further determined by any parameters and other

attributes that you specify. Rules, capabilities and templates may be combined as follows:

◆ If you specify rules along with capabilities, ISP creates volumes that comply to the rules that

are defined in the capabilities, and also to those rules that you specify as arguments to

vxvoladm.

◆ If you specify rules along with templates, ISP creates volumes that comply to the rules in the

templates, and also to those rules that are specified as arguments to vxvoladm.

◆ If you specify capabilities along with templates, ISP selects the appropriate templates from

those specified that conform to the desired capabilities.