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

Chapter 2 74
Placing Disks Under VxVM Control
When you add a disk to a system that is running VxVM, you need to put
the disk under VxVM control so that VxVM can control the space
allocation on the disk. Unless another disk group is specified, VxVM
places new disks in the default disk group, rootdg.
The method by which you place a disk under VxVM control depends on
the circumstances:
• If the disk is new, it must be initialized and placed under VxVM
control. You can use the menu-based vxdiskadm utility to do this.
CAUTION Initialization destroys existing data on disks.
• If the disk is not needed immediately, it can be initialized (but not
added to a disk group) and reserved for future use. To do this, enter
none when asked to name a disk group. Do not confuse this type of
“spare disk” with a hot-relocation spare disk.
• If the disk was previously initialized for future use by VxVM, it can
be reinitialized and placed under VxVM control.
• If the disk was previously used for a file system,VxVM prompts you
to confirm that you really want to destroy the file system.
• If the disk was previously in use by the LVM subsystem, you can
preserve existing data while still letting VxVM take control of the
disk. This is accomplished using conversion. With conversion, the
virtual layout of the data is fully converted to VxVM control (see the
VERITAS Volume Manager Migration Guide).
• If the disk was previously in use by the LVM subsystem, but you do
not want to preserve the data on it, use the LVM command,
pvremove, before attempting to initialize the disk for VxVM.
• Multiple disks on one or more controllers can be placed under VxVM
control simultaneously. Depending on the circumstances, all of the
disks may not be processed the same way.
• When initializing multiple disks at once, it is possible to exclude
certain disks or controllers.