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

83Administering disks
Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
Disks in JBODs that do not fall into any supported category, and which are not capable of
being multipathed by DMP are placed in the OTHER_DISKS category.
Adding support for a new disk array
The following example illustrates how to add support for a new disk array named
vrtsda to an HP-UXsystem using a vendor-supplied package on a mounted CD-ROM:
# swinstall -s /cdrom vrtsda
The new disk array does not need to be already connected to the system when the package
is installed. If any of the disks in the new disk array are subsequently connected, and if
vxconfigd is running,
vxconfigd immediately invokes the Device Discovery
function and includes the new disks in the VxVM device list.
Enabling discovery of new devices
To have VxVM discover a new disk array, use the following command:
# vxdctl enable
This command scans all of the disk devices and their attributes, updates the VxVM device
list, and reconfigures DMP with the new device database. There is no need to reboot the
host.
Note: This command ensures that dynamic multipathing is set up correctly on the array.
Otherwise, VxVM treats the independent paths to the disks as separate devices, which can
result in data corruption.
Removing support for a disk array
To remove support for the vrtsda disk array, use the following command:
# swremove vrtsda
If the arrays remain physically connected to the host after support has been removed, they
are listed in the OTHER_DISKS category, and the volumes remain available.
Third-party driver coexistence
The third-party driver (TPD) coexistence feature of VxVM 4.1 allows I/O that is
controlled by third-party multipathing drivers to bypass DMP while retaining the
monitoring capabilities of DMP. Provided that a suitable ASL is available, devices that
use TPDs can be discovered without requiring you to set up a specification file, or to run a
special command. In previous releases, VxVM only supported TPD coexistence if the
code of the third-party driver was intrusively modified. The new TPD coexistence feature
maintains backward compatibility with such methods, but it also permits coexistence
without require any change in a third-party multipathing driver.