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

Chapter
2
Administering disks
This chapter describes the operations for managing disks used by the Veritas Volume
Manager (VxVM). This includes placing disks under VxVM control, initializing disks,
mirroring the root disk, and removing and replacing disks.
Note: Most VxVM commands require superuser or equivalent privileges.
Disks that are controlled by the LVM subsystem cannot be used directly as VxVM disks,
but they can be converted so that their volume groups and logical volumes become VxVM
disk groups and volumes. For more information on conversion, see the Veritas Volume
Manager Migration Guide.
For information about configuring and administering the dynamic multipathing (DMP)
feature of VxVM that is used with multiported disk arrays, see “Administering dynamic
multipathing (DMP)” on page 121.
Disk devices
When performing disk administration, it is important to understand the difference between
a disk name and a device name.
When a disk is placed under VxVM control, a VM disk is assigned to it. You can define a
symbolic disk name (also known as a disk media name) to refer to a VM disk for the
purposes of administration. A disk name can be up to 31 characters long. If you do not
assign a disk name, it defaults to diskgroup## where diskgroup is the name of the disk
group to which the disk is being added, and ## is a sequence number. Your system may
use device names that differ from those given in the examples.
The device name (sometimes referred to as devname or disk access name) defines the
name of a disk device as it is known to the operating system. Such devices are usually, but
not always, located in the /dev/[r]dsk directories. Devices that are specific to
hardware from certain vendors may use their own path name conventions.