VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Administrator's Guide (September 2002)

Chapter 7, Creating Volumes

Using vxassist

163

For tasks requiring new disk space, vxassist seeks out available disk space and

allocates it in the conﬁguration that conforms to the layout speciﬁcations and that offers

the best use of free space.

The vxassist command takes this form:

# vxassist [options] keyword volume [attributes...]

wherekeyword selectsthe taskto perform.The ﬁrst argumentafter avxassist keyword,

volume, is a volume name, which is followed by a set of desired volume attributes. For

example, the keyword make allows you to create a new volume:

# vxassist [options] make volume length [attributes]

The length of the volume can be speciﬁed in sectors, kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes

using a sufﬁx character of s, k, m,org. If no sufﬁx is speciﬁed, the size is assumed to be in

sectors. See the vxintro(1M) manual page for more information on specifying units.

Additional attributes can be speciﬁed as appropriate, depending on the characteristics

that you wishthe volume tohave. Examples arestripe unitwidth,number ofcolumnsin a

RAID-5 or stripe volume, number of mirrors, number of logs, and log type.

Note By default, the vxassist command creates volumes in the rootdg disk group. To

use a different disk group, specify the -g diskgroup option to vxassist.

For details of available vxassist keywords and attributes, refer to the vxassist(1M)

manual page.

The section, “Creating a Volume on Any Disk” on page 165 describes the simplest way to

create a volume with default attributes. Later sections describe how to create volumes

with speciﬁc attributes. For example, “Creating a Volume on Speciﬁc Disks” on page 166

describes how to control how vxassist uses the available storage space.

Setting Default Values for vxassist

The default values that the vxassist command uses may be speciﬁed in the ﬁle

/etc/default/vxassist. The defaults listed in this ﬁle take effect if you do not

override them on the command line, or in an alternate defaults ﬁle that you specify using

the -d option. A default value speciﬁed on the command line always takes precedence.

vxassist also has a set of built-in defaults that it uses if it cannot ﬁnd a value deﬁned

elsewhere.

Note You must create the /etc/default directory and the vxassist default ﬁle if

these do not already exist on your system.