VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Installation Guide (August 2002)

Chapter 3, Setting up the VxVM Environment
Using vxinstall
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Using vxinstall
This section describes how to use vxinstall.
To place some of your disks in another disk group, wait until after you have used
vxinstall to set up rootdg. Use vxdiskadm(1M) or the VEA to create and populate
other groups.
Note You only need to run vxinstall once.
Using vxinstall with Unused Disks
Note This procedure describes how to use vxinstall to put existing free disks, which
are not in use by LVM or other data managers (such as databases or file systems),
under VxVM control.
1. Log in as root.
2. If you wantto excludeany disks,controllers, or enclosuresfrom VxVM control,create
the file /etc/vx/disks.exclude, the file /etc/vx/cntrls.exclude, or the file
/etc/vx/enclr.exclude, respectively, and add the names of those disks,
controllers, or enclosures to the appropriate file.
If you have any disksthat arein use, explicitlyexcluding them thisway allows youto
run the “Quick Installation” option of vxinstall.
Note The /etc/vx/disks.exclude, /etc/vx/cntrls.exclude, and
/etc/vx/enclr.exclude files are used only by vxinstall and vxdiskadm to
automatically exclude controllers, disks or enclosures so that these devices are not
configured as Volume Manager devices. These files do not exclude controllers,
disks, and enclosures from use by any other VxVM commands. VEA, does not use
these files.
You may want to exclude from VxVM control:
- Raw disks that contain file systems.
- Raw disks in use by other managing agents, such as databases.
When the VEA or a VxVM utility, such as vxinstall, or vxdiskadm, brings a disk
under VxVM control, it destroys any data on the disk. VxVM utilities recognize file
systems on raw disks, and will ask you to confirm that the data can be destroyed.
However, VxVM utilities do not recognize raw disks that are managed by other
agents. It is safest to explicitly exclude any disks in use by editing the exclude file.