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

Configuring Newly Added Disk Devices
56 VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide
◆ simple—the public and private regions are on the same disk area (with the public area
following the private area). Typically, most or all disks on your system are configured
as this disk type.
◆ nopriv—there is no private region (only a public region for allocating subdisks).
This is the simplest disk type consisting only of space for allocating subdisks. Nopriv
disks are most useful for defining special devices (such as RAM disks, if supported)
on which private region data would not persist between reboots. They can also be
used to encapsulate disks where there is insufficient room for a private region. Such
disks cannot store configuration and log copies, and they do not support the use of
thevxdisk addregion command todefinereservedregions.VxVM cannot trackthe
movement of nopriv disks on a SCSI chain or between controllers.
On some systems, VxVM asks the operating system for a list of known disk device
addresses. These device addresses are auto-configured into the rootdg disk group when
vxconfigd is started. Auto-configured disks are always of type simple, with default
attributes.
For more information about disk types and their configuration, see the vxdisk(1M)
manual page.
Metadevices
Two classes of disk device files can be used with VxVM: standard devices, and special
devices known as metadevices. Metadevices are only used with operating systems that
support dynamic multipathing (DMP). Such devices represent the physical disks that a
system can access via more than one physical path. The available access paths depend on
whether the disk is a single disk, or part of a multiported disk array that is connected to a
system.
You can use the vxdisk utility to display the paths subsumed by a metadevice, and to
display the status of each path (for example, whether it is enabled or disabled). For more
information, see “Administering Dynamic Multipathing (DMP)” on page 85.
Configuring Newly Added Disk Devices
When you physically connect new disks to a host or when you zone new fibre channel
devices to a host, you can use the vxdctl command to rebuild the volume device node
directories and to update the DMP internal database to reflect the new state of the system.
To reconfigure the DMP database, first run ioscan followed by insf to make the
operating system recognize the new disks, and then invoke the vxdctl enable
command. See the vxdctl(1M) manual page for more information.