VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator's Guide

Creating Volumes

Using vxassist

Chapter 7 231

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 the rootdg disk

group. 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 235 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 236 describes how to

control how vxassist uses the available storage space.

Setting Default Values for vxassist

The default values that the vxassist command uses may be speciﬁed in

the ﬁle /etc/default/vxassist. The defaults listed in this ﬁle take effect if

you do not override them on the command line, or in an alternate

defaults ﬁle that you specify using the -d option. A default value speciﬁed

on the command line always takes precedence. vxassist also has a set of

built-in defaults that it uses if it cannot ﬁnd a value deﬁned elsewhere.