VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Migration Guide

Chapter 2 1
2 Converting LVM to VxVM
Summary
This chapter explains how to convert your LVM configuration to a VxVM configuration and
presents the following main topics:
• “Converting Unused LVM Physical Volumes to VxVM Disks” on page 3
• “Converting LVM Volume Groups to VxVM Disk Groups” on page 5
• “Restoring the LVM Volume Group Configuration” on page 16
• “Examples” on page 20
The basic tools for conversion are the VxVM commands, vxvmconvert and vxdiskadm, and
the LVM administrative utilities such as pvremove and vgcfgbackup. The discussion here
details how to use these tools and gives some insights into how these tools work.
The disks on your system managed by LVM can be of two types: LVM disks in volume groups,
and unused disks.
The former are disks that contain logical volumes and volume groups. Unused disks contain
no user data, and are not used by any volume group, but have LVM disk headers written by
pvcreate. Conversion is done differently for these two types of disks.
For unused LVM disks you can use a combination of pvremove and vxdiskadm. For LVM disks
in volume groups, the primary tool for conversion is the vxvmconvert command. For
information on vxdiskadm, see the man page vxdiskadm (1M) or VERITAS Volume Manager
Administrator's Guide.
Converting Unused LVM Physical Volumes to VxVM Disks
LVM disks which are not part of any volume group, and contain no user data, are simply
cleaned up, so that there are no LVM disk headers. Then the disks are given over to VxVM
through the normal means of initializing disks.