VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 Migration Guide

Converting LVM to VxVM
Chapter 2 23
2 Converting LVM to VxVM
This chapter explains how to convert your LVM configuration to a VxVM
configuration and presents the following main topics:
• “Converting Unused LVM Physical Volumes to VxVM Disks”
• “Converting LVM Volume Groups to VxVM Disk Groups”
• “Restoring the LVM Volume Group Configuration”
• “Examples”
The basic tools for conversion are the VxVM commands, vxvmconvert
and vxdiskadm, and the LVM administrative utilities such as pvremove
and vgcfgbackup. The discussion here details how to use these tools and
gives some insights into how these tools work.
The disks on your system managed by LVM can be of two types: LVM
disks in volume groups, and unused disks.
The former are disks that contain logical volumes and volume groups.
Unused disks contain no user data, and are not used by any volume
group, but have LVM disk headers written by pvcreate. Conversion is
done differently for these two types of disks.
For unused LVM disks you can use a combination of pvremove and
vxdiskadm. For LVM disks in volume groups, the primary tool for
conversion is the vxvmconvert command. For information on vxdiskadm,
see the man page vxdiskadm (1M) or the VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1
Administrator’s Guide.