Veritas Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator's Guide (HP-UX 11i v3, February 2007)

Using vxassist
200 VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide
The vxassist utility helps you perform the following tasks:
◆ Creating volumes.
◆ Creating mirrors for existing volumes.
◆ Growing or shrinking existing volumes.
◆ Backing up volumes online.
◆ Reconfiguring a volume’s layout online.
vxassist obtains most of the information it needs from sources other than your input.
vxassist obtains information about the existing objects and their layouts from the
objects themselves.
For tasks requiring new disk space, vxassist seeks out available disk space and
allocates it in the configuration that conforms to the layout specifications and that offers
the best use of free space.
The vxassist command takes this form:
# vxassist [options] keyword volume [attributes...]
where keyword selects the task to perform. The first argument after a vxassist keyword,
volume, is a volume name, which is followed by a set of desired volume attributes. For
example, the keyword make allows you to create a new volume:
# vxassist [options] make volume length [attributes]
The length of the volume can be specified in sectors, kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes
using a suffix character of s, k, m, or g. If no suffix is specified, the size is assumed to be in
sectors. See the vxintro(1M) manual page for more information on specifying units.
Additional attributes can be specified as appropriate, depending on the characteristics
that you wish the volume to have. Examples are stripe unit width, number of columns in a
RAID-5 or stripe volume, number of mirrors, number of logs, and log type.
Note By default, the vxassist command creates volumes in a default disk group
according to the rules given in “Rules for Determining the Default Disk Group” on
page 133. To use a different disk group, specify the -g diskgroup option to
vxassist.
For details of available vxassist keywords and attributes, refer to the vxassist(1M)
manual page.
The section, “Creating a Volume on Any Disk” on page 203 describes the simplest way to
create a volume with default attributes. Later sections describe how to create volumes
with specific attributes. For example, “Creating a Volume on Specific Disks” on page 203
describes how to control how vxassist uses the available storage space.