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

Administering Disks

Introduction

This chapter describes the operations for managing disks used by the VERITAS Volume

Manager (VxVM). This includes placing disks under VxVM control, initializing disks,

mirroring the root disk, and removing and replacing disks.

Note Most VxVM commands require superuser or equivalent privileges.

Note Rootability, which puts the root disk under VxVM control and allows it to be

mirrored, is supported for this release of VxVM for HP-UX. See “Rootability” on

page 69 for more information.

Note Disks that are controlled by the LVM subsystem cannot be used directly as VxVM

disks, but they can be converted so that their volume groups and logical volumes

become VxVM disk groups and volumes. For more information on conversion, see

the VERITAS Volume Manager Migration Guide.

For information about conﬁguring and administering the Dynamic Multipathing (DMP)

feature of VxVM that is used with multiported disk arrays, see “Administering Dynamic

Multipathing (DMP)” on page 85.

Disk Devices

When performing disk administration, it is important to understand the difference

between a disk name and a device name.

When a disk is placed under VxVM control, a VM disk is assigned to it. You can deﬁne a

symbolic disk name(also knownas a diskmedia name)to refer to aVM diskfor the purposes

of administration.A disk name can beup to 31 characters long. Ifyou do not assign adisk

name, it defaults to disk## if the disk is being added to rootdg (where ## is a sequence

number). Otherwise, the default disk name is groupname##, where groupname is the

name of the disk group to which the disk is added. Your system may use a device name

that differs from the examples.