VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator's Guide

Chapter 4 172
Reorganizing the Contents of Disk Groups
NOTE You may need an additional license to use this feature.
There are several circumstances under which you might want to
reorganize the contents of your existing disk groups:
• To group volumes or disks differently as the needs of your
organization change. For example, you might want to split disk
groups to match the boundaries of separate departments, or to join
disk groups when departments are merged.
• To reduce the size of a disk group’s configuration database in the
event that its private region is nearly full. This is a much simpler
solution than the alternative of trying to grow the private region.
• To perform online maintenance and upgrading of fault-tolerant
systems that can be split into separate hosts for this purpose, and
then rejoined.
• To implement off-host processing solutions for the purposes of
backup or decision support in a cluster environment. This is
discussed further in Chapter 11, “Configuring Off-Host Processing,”
on page 383.
You can use either the VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA) or the
vxdg command to reorganize your disk groups. For more information
about using the graphical user interface, see the <BookTitle>VERITAS
Volume Manager (UNIX) User’s Guide — VEA. This section describes
how to use the vxdg command.
The vxdg command provides the following operations for reorganizing
disk groups: