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

Creating Volumes

Creating a Volume Using vxmake

Chapter 7 241

Creating a Volume Using vxmake

As an alternative to using vxassist, you can create a volume using the

vxmake command to arrange existing subdisks into plexes, and then to

form these plexes into a volume. Subdisks can be created using the

method described in “Creating Subdisks” on page 179. The example

given in this section is to create a RAID-5 volume using vxmake.

Creating a RAID-5 plex for a RAID-5 volume is similar to creating

striped plexes, except that the layout attribute is set to raid5. Subdisks

can be implicitly associated in the same way as with striped plexes. For

example, to create a four-column RAID-5 plex with a stripe unit size of

32 sectors, use the following command:

# vxmake plex raidplex layout=raid5 stwidth=32 \

sd=disk00-01,disk01-00,disk02-00,disk03-00

Note that because four subdisks are speciﬁed, but the number of columns

is not speciﬁed, the vxmake command assumes a four-column RAID-5

plex and places one subdisk in each column. Striped plexes are created

using the same method except that the layout is speciﬁed as stripe. If the

subdisks are to be created and added later, use the following command to

create the plex:

# vxmake plex raidplex layout=raid5 ncolumn=4 stwidth=32

NOTE If no subdisks are speciﬁed, the ncolumn attribute must be speciﬁed.

Subdisks can be added to the plex later using the vxsd assoc command

(see “Associating Subdisks with Plexes” on page 184).

If each column in a RAID-5 plex is to be created from multiple subdisks

which may span several physical disks, you can specify to which column

each subdisk should be added. For example, to create a three-column

RAID-5 plex using six subdisks, use the following form of the vxmake

command:

# vxmake plex raidplex layout=raid5 stwidth=32

\sd=disk00-00:0,disk01-00:1,disk02-00:2,disk03-00:0, \

disk04-00:1,disk05-00:2