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

231Creating volumes
Using vxassist
Assisted approach
The assisted approach takes information about what you want to accomplish and then
performs the necessary underlying tasks. This approach requires only minimal input from
you, but also permits more detailed specifications.
Assisted operations are performed primarily through the
vxassist command or the
Veritas Enterprise Administrator (VEA).
vxassist and the VEA create the required
plexes and subdisks using only the basic attributes of the desired volume as input.
Additionally, they can modify existing volumes while automatically modifying any
underlying or associated objects.
Both
vxassist and the VEA use default values for many volume attributes, unless you
provide specific values. They do not require you to have a thorough understanding of low-
level VxVM concepts, vxassist and the VEA do not conflict with other VxVM
commands or preclude their use. Objects created by vxassist and the VEA are
compatible and inter-operable with objects created by other VxVM commands and
interfaces.
For more information about the VEA, see the Veritas Enterprise Administrator User’s
Guide and VEA online help.
Using vxassist
You can use the vxassist utility to create and modify volumes. Specify the basic
requirements for volume creation or modification, and vxassist performs the necessary
tasks.
The advantages of using vxassist rather than the advanced approach include:
■ Most actions require that you enter only one command rather than several.
■ You are required to specify only minimal information to vxassist. If necessary,
you can specify additional parameters to modify or control its actions.
■ Operations result in a set of configuration changes that either succeed or fail as a
group, rather than individually. System crashes or other interruptions do not leave
intermediate states that you have to clean up. If vxassist finds an error or an
exceptional condition, it exits after leaving the system in the same state as it was prior
to the attempted operation.
The vxassist utility helps you perform the following tasks:
■ Creating volumes.
■ Creating mirrors for existing volumes.
■ Growing or shrinking existing volumes.
■ Backing up volumes online.
■ Reconfiguring a volume’s layout online.