VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Migration Guide (September 2004)

Chapter 2

Converting LVM to VxVM

2 Converting LVM to VxVM

This chapter explains how to convert your LVM conﬁguration to a VxVM conﬁguration and presents the

following main topics:

• “Converting Unused LVM Physical Volumes to VxVM Disks” on page 10

• “Converting LVM Volume Groups to VxVM Disk Groups” on page 11

• “Restoring the LVM Volume Group Conﬁguration” on page 19

• “Examples” on page 22

The basic tools for conversion are the VxVM commands, vxvmconvert and vxdiskadm, and the LVM

administrative utilities such as pvremove and vgcfgbackup. The discussion here details how to use these

tools and gives some insights into how these tools work.

The disks on your system managed by LVM can be of two types: LVM disks in volume groups, and unused

disks.

The former are disks that contain logical volumes and volume groups. Unused disks contain no user data, and

are not used by any volume group, but have LVM disk headers written by pvcreate. Conversion is done

differently for these two types of disks.

For unused LVM disks you can use a combination of pvremove and vxdiskadm. For LVM disks in volume

groups, the primary tool for conversion is the vxvmconvert command. For information on vxdiskadm, see the

man page vxdiskadm (1M) or the VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide.