VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator's Guide

Creating Volumes

Using vxassist

Chapter 7230

Using vxassist

You can use the vxassist command to create and modify volumes. Specify

the basic requirements for volume creation or modiﬁcation, and vxassist

performs the necessary tasks.

The advantages of using vxassist rather than the advanced approach

include:

• Most actions require that you enter only one command rather than

several.

• You are required to specify only minimal information to vxassist. If

necessary, you can specify additional parameters to modify or control

its actions.

• Operations result in a set of conﬁguration changes that either

succeed or fail as a group, rather than individually. System crashes

or other interruptions do not leave intermediate states that you have

to clean up. If vxassist ﬁnds an error or an exceptional condition, it

exits after leaving the system in the same state as it was prior to the

attempted operation.

vxassist 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...]