Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0 Solutions Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

Chapter
2
Volume creation solutions
Volumes that you create by using Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP) are
similar to traditional non-ISP volumes that you create using the
vxassist
utility, but have the advantage that their intent is preserved and cannot
accidentally be degraded. ISP volumes can be managed by using commands such
as
vxassist or vxvoladm, or by using the VEA client graphical user interface.
In release 5.0 of VxVM, it is possible to use the vxassist command to create ISP
volumes. This chapter provides an overview of the various ways in which you
can use
vxassist to create ISP volumes for use by applications.
For full details, refer to the Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage
Provisioning Administrator’s Guide.
Ensuring volume redundancy
ISP automatically ensures that a volume retains its redundancy when it is
resized or if the disk array moves data across disks. It also ensures that volume
mirrors do not reside on the same physical disk while the volume is created or
resized.
The following example command creates a 2-gigabyte mirrored volume with 2
mirrors, with the mirrors located on separate enclosures:
# vxassist -g mydg -P mypool make strpvol 2g \
capability=’DataMirroring,MirrorsOnSeparateComponents’
Such a volume tolerates the failure of one enclosure and provides greater
reliability. This volume could also be created by specifying traditional
vxassist
storage specification parameters:
# vxassist -g mydg -P mypool make strpvol 2g layout=mirror \
nmir=2 mirror=enclosure
However, it is not possible to use the old-style vxassist specification attributes
to replicate all of ISP’s advanced allocation features. For example, the
capabilities that specify the creation of a volume mirrored across enclosures can