VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Administrator's Guide (September 2004)

Creating Volumes
Creating a RAID-5 Volume
Chapter 7238
Creating a RAID-5 Volume
NOTE VxVM supports this feature for private disk groups, but not for shareable
disk groups in a cluster environment.
NOTE You may need an additional license to use this feature.
You can create RAID-5 volumes by using either the vxassist command
(recommended) or the vxmake command. Both approaches are described
below.
NOTE A RAID-5 volume requires space to be available on at least as many
disks in the disk group as the number of columns in the volume.
Additional disks may be required for any RAID-5 logs that are created.
A RAID-5 volume contains a RAID-5 data plex that consists of three or
more subdisks located on three or more physical disks. Only one RAID-5
data plex can exist per volume. A RAID-5 volume can also contain one or
more RAID-5 log plexes, which are used to log information about data
and parity being written to the volume. For more information on RAID-5
volumes, see “RAID-5 (Striping with Parity)” on page 29.
CAUTION Do not create a RAID-5 volume with more than 8 columns because the
volume will be unrecoverable in the event of the failure of more than one
disk.
To create a RAID-5 volume, use the following command:
# vxassist [-b] [-g diskgroup] make volume length
layout=raid5 \[ncol=number_columns] [stripewidth=size]
[nlog=number] \[loglen=log_length]