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

Creating a Volume Using vxmake
180 VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide
Creating a Volume Using a vxmake Description File
You can use the vxmake command to add a new volume, plex or subdisk to the set of
objects managed by VxVM. vxmake adds a record for each new object to the VxVM
configuration database.You can create records eitherby specifyingparameters tovxmake
on the command line, or by using a file which contains plain-text descriptions of the
objects. The file can also contain commands for performing a list of tasks. Use the
following form of the command to have vxmake read the file from the standard input:
# vxmake < description_file
Alternatively, you can specify the file to vxmake using the -d option:
# vxmake -d description_file
The following sample description file defines a volume, db, with two plexes:
#rectyp #name #options
sd disk3-01 disk=disk3 offset=0 len=10000
sd disk3-02 disk=disk3 offset=25000 len=10480
sd disk4-01 disk=disk4 offset=0 len=8000
sd disk4-02 disk=disk4 offset=15000 len=8000
sd disk4-03 disk=disk4 offset=30000 len=4480
plex db-01 layout=STRIPE ncolumn=2 stwidth=16k
sd=disk3-01:0/0,disk3-02:0/10000,disk4-01:1/0,
disk4-02:1/8000,disk4-03:1/16000
sd ramd1-01 disk=ramd1 len=640
comment=”Hot spot for dbvol
plex db-02 sd=ramd1-01:40320
vol db usetype=gen plex=db-01,db-02
readpol=prefer prefname=db-02
comment=”Uses mem1 for hot spot in last 5m
The first plex, db-01, is striped and has five subdisks on two physical disks, disk3 and
disk4. The second plex, db-02, is the preferred plex in the mirror, and has one subdisk,
ramd1-01, on a volatile memory disk.
For detailed information about how to use vxmake, refer to the vxmake(1M) manual
page.
After creating a volume using vxmake, you must initialize it before it can be used. The
procedure is described in the following section, “Initializing and Starting a Volume.”