VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Administrator's Guide

Creating Volumes
Initializing and Starting a Volume
Chapter 7258
Initializing and Starting a Volume
A volume must be initialized if it was created by the vxmake command
and has not yet been initialized, or if the volume has been set to an
uninitialized state.
NOTE If you create a volume using the vxassist command, vxassist initializes
and starts the volume automatically unless you specify the attribute
init=none.
To initialize and start a volume, use the following command:
# vxvol start volume
When creating a volume, you can make it immediately available for use
by specifying the -b option to the vxassist command, as shown here:
# vxassist -b make volume length layout=mirror
The -b option makes VxVM carry out any required initialization as a
background task. It also greatly speeds up the creation of striped
volumes by initializing the columns in parallel.
As an alternative to the -b option, you can specify the init=active
attribute to make a new volume immediately available for use. In this
example, init=active is specified to prevent VxVM from synchronizing
the empty data plexes of a new mirrored volume:
# vxassist make volume length layout=mirror init=active
CAUTION There is a very small risk of errors occurring when the init=active
attribute is used. Although written blocks are guaranteed to be
consistent, read errors can arise in the unlikely event that fsck attempts
to verify uninitialized space in the file system, or if a file remains
unitialized following a system crash. If in doubt, use the -b option to
vxassist instead.
The following command can be used to enable a volume without
initializing it: