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

Getting Started with VxVM VEA
Disk Failure or Removal
Chapter 244
Disk Failure or Removal
Moving a subdisk for redundant volumes (mirrored or RAID-5) will use
the redundant data to recreate the subdisk on the healthy disk. However,
for nonredundant volumes (concatenated or striped), the data cannot be
recreated and doing subdisk move will therefore lose data, which could
be recovered if the disk can be repaired. Thus, when you attempt to move
a subdisk from a failed or missing disk that has nonredundant data, a
dialog box comes up that asks you if you want to force the move. You may
want to force the move if you don't need the data anymore or you can no
longer recover the data. By doing so, you will retain the volume structure
but there is no guarantee that the data will be recoverable.
Use the “Moving a Subdisk” on page 148 feature to move the part of a
volume that is on a failed or missing disk to a healthy one.
Disk Phaseout
When a disk starts getting intermittent I/O errors and shows signs of
hardware fatigue, you can use the “Moving a Subdisk” on page 148
feature to move all its subdisks to healthier disks. The benefit of moving
subdisks instead of copying the volumes is that you need only enough
space on the receiving disks for the subdisks on the one failed disk, not
for entire volumes that may span multiple disks. Another advantage is
that there is no interruption in I/O.
Moving subdisks provides you a flexible means of making adjustments in
your storage system while it is up and running.