Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Administrator's Guide (September 2006)

216 Creating and administering plexes

Creating a striped plex

To create a striped plex, you must specify additional attributes. For example, to create a

striped plex named pl-01 in the disk group, mydg, with a stripe width of 32 sectors and

2 columns, use the following command:

# vxmake -g mydg plex pl-01 layout=stripe stwidth=32 ncolumn=2 \

sd=mydg01-01,mydg02-01

To use a plex to build a volume, you must associate the plex with the volume. For more

information, see the section, “Attaching and associating plexes” on page 221.

Displaying plex information

Listing plexes helps identify free plexes for building volumes. Use the plex (–p) option to

the

vxprint command to list information about all plexes.

To display detailed information about all plexes in the system, use the following

command:

# vxprint -lp

To display detailed information about a specific plex, use the following command:

# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -l plex

The -t option prints a single line of information about the plex. To list free plexes, use the

following command:

# vxprint -pt

The following section describes the meaning of the various plex states that may be

displayed in the STATE field of

vxprint output.

Plex states

Plex states reflect whether or not plexes are complete and are consistent copies (mirrors)

of the volume contents. VxVM utilities automatically maintain the plex state. However, if

a volume should not be written to because there are changes to that volume and if a plex is

associated with that volume, you can modify the state of the plex. For example, if a disk

with a particular plex located on it begins to fail, you can temporarily disable that plex.

Note: A plex does not have to be associated with a volume. A plex can be created with the

vxmake plex command and be attached to a volume later.