VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 Administrator's Guide

Disk Tasks
Disk Utilities
Chapter 4150
Disk Utilities
The Volume Manager provides four interfaces that you can use to
manage disks:
• the graphical user interface
• a set of command-line utilities
• the vxdiskadm menu-based interface
• the unrelocate utility
Utilities discussed in this chapter include:
• vxdiskadm—the vxdiskadm utility is the Volume Manager Support
Operations menu interface. The vxdiskadm utility provides a menu of
disk operations. Each entry in the main menu leads you through a
particular task by providing you with information and prompts.
Default answers are provided for many questions so you can easily
select common answers.
• vxdiskadd—the vxdiskadd utility is used to add standard disks to
the Volume Manager. The vxdiskadd utility leads you through the
process of initializing a new disk by displaying information and
prompts. See the vxdiskadd(1M) manual page for more information.
• vxdisk—the vxdisk utility is the command-line utility for
administering disk devices. The vxdisk utility defines special disk
devices, initializes information stored on disks (that the Volume
Manager uses to identify and manage disks), and performs additional
special operations. See the vxdisk(1M) manual page for more
information.
In Volume Manager, physical disks connected to the system are
represented as metadevices with one or more physical access paths.
The access paths depend on whether the disk is a single disk or part
of a multiported disk array connected to the system. Use the vxdisk
utility to display the paths of a metadevice, and to display the status
of each path (for example, enabled or disabled). For example, to
display details on disk01, enter:
# vxdisk list disk01
• vxunreloc—VxVM Hot-relocation allows the system to
automatically react to I/O failures on a redundant VxVM object at the