VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Installation Guide (September 2004)

Setting up the VxVM Environment

Using vxinstall

Chapter 3

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.

Step 1. Log in as root.

Step 2. If you want to exclude any disks, controllers, or enclosures from 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 disks that are in use, explicitly excluding them this way allows you to 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.

You must create the exclude files, /etc/vx/disks.exclude, /etc/vx/enclr.exclude, and

/etc/vx/cntrls.exclude, if you need them; they are not created automatically. To exclude a

disk, add its base device file name on a line by itself in the file. For example:

# cat /etc/vx/disks.exclude

c0t0d0

c0t2d0

c1t10d0