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

230 Creating volumes
Creating a volume
■ “Creating a volume with a version 20 DCO volume” on page 242 for creating a
volume with DRL configured within a version 20 DCO volume.
■ RAID-5 logs are used to prevent corruption of data during recovery of RAID-5
volumes (see “RAID-5 logging” on page 50 for details). These logs are configured as
plexes on disks other than those that are used for the columns of the RAID-5 volume.
See “Creating a RAID-5 volume” on page 246 for information on creating a RAID-5
volume together with RAID-5 logs.
Creating a volume
You can create volumes using an advanced approach, an assisted approach, or the rule-
based storage allocation approach that is provided by the Intelligent Storage Provisioning
(ISP) feature. Each method uses different tools. You may switch between the advanced
and the assisted approaches at will. For more information about ISP, see the Veritas
Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator’s Guide.
Note: Most VxVM commands require superuser or equivalent privileges.
Advanced approach
The advanced approach consists of a number of commands that typically require you to
specify detailed input. These commands use a “building block” approach that requires you
to have a detailed knowledge of the underlying structure and components to manually
perform the commands necessary to accomplish a certain task. Advanced operations are
performed using several different VxVM commands.
To create a volume using the advanced approach
1 Create subdisks using
vxmake sd; see “Creating subdisks” on page 207.
2 Create plexes using
vxmake plex, and associate subdisks with them; see “Creating
plexes” on page 215, “Associating subdisks with plexes” on page 210 and “Creating
a volume using vxmake” on page 249.
3 Associate plexes with the volume using
vxmake vol; see “Creating a volume using
vxmake” on page 249.
4 Initialize the volume using vxvol start or vxvol init zero; see “Initializing and
starting a volume created using vxmake” on page 252.
See “Creating a volume using a vxmake description file” on page 250 for an example of
how you can combine steps 1 through 3 using a volume description file with
vxmake.
See “Creating a volume using vxmake” on page 249 for an example of how to perform
steps 2 and 3 to create a RAID-5 volume.