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

81Administering disks
Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
By default, auto-configured non-EFI disks are formatted as cdsdisk disks when they
are initialized for use with VxVM. You can change the default format by using the
vxdiskadm(1M) command to update the /etc/default/vxdisk defaults file as
described in “Displaying and changing default disk layout attributes” on page 95. See the
vxdisk(1M) manual page for details of the usage of this file, and for more information
about disk types and their configuration.
Auto-configured EFI disks are formatted as hpdisk disks by default.
Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
When you physically connect new disks to a host or when you zone new fibre channel
devices to a host, you can use the
vxdctl enable command to rebuild the volume device
node directories and to update the DMP internal database to reflect the new state of the
system.
To reconfigure the DMP database, first run
ioscan followed by insf to make the
operating system recognize the new disks, and then invoke the
vxdctl enable command.
See the
vxdctl(1M) manual page for more information.
You can also use the
vxdisk scandisks command to scan devices in the operating
system device tree, and to initiate dynamic reconfiguration of multipathed disks.
If you want VxVM to scan only for new devices that have been added to the system, and
for devices that have been enabled or disabled, specify the
-f option to either of the
commands, as shown here:
# vxdctl -f enable
# vxdisk -f scandisks
However, a complete scan is initiated if the system configuration has been modified by
changes to:
■ Installed array support libraries.
■ The devices that are listed as being excluded from use by VxVM.
■ DISKS (JBOD), SCSI3, or foreign device definitions.
See the
vxdctl(1M) and vxdisk(1M) manual pages for more information.
Partial device discovery
The Dynamic Multipathing (DMP) feature of VxVM supports partial device discovery
where you can include or exclude sets of disks or disks attached to controllers from the
discovery process.
The
vxdisk scandisks command rescans the devices in the OS device tree and triggers
a DMP reconfiguration. You can specify parameters to
vxdisk scandisks to implement