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

90 Administering disks
Changing the disk-naming scheme
The method by which you place a disk under VxVM control depends on the
circumstances:
■ If the disk is new, it must be initialized and placed under VxVM control. You can use
the menu-based
vxdiskadm utility to do this.
Caution: Initialization destroys existing data on disks.
■ If the disk is not needed immediately, it can be initialized (but not added to a disk
group) and reserved for future use. To do this, enter none when asked to name a disk
group. Do not confuse this type of “spare disk” with a hot-relocation spare disk.
■ If the disk was previously initialized for future use by VxVM, it can be reinitialized
and placed under VxVM control.
■ If the disk was previously used for a file system, VxVM prompts you to confirm that
you really want to destroy the file system.
■ If the disk was previously in use by the LVM subsystem, you can preserve existing
data while still letting VxVM take control of the disk. This is accomplished using
conversion. With conversion, the virtual layout of the data is fully converted to
VxVM control (see the Veritas Volume Manager Migration Guide).
■ If the disk was previously in use by the LVM subsystem, but you do not want to
preserve the data on it, use the LVM command,
pvremove, before attempting to
initialize the disk for VxVM.
■ Multiple disks on one or more controllers can be placed under VxVM control
simultaneously. Depending on the circumstances, all of the disks may not be
processed the same way.
It is possible to configure the vxdiskadm utility not to list certain disks or controllers as
being available. For example, this may be useful in a SAN environment where disk
enclosures are visible to a number of separate systems.
To exclude a device from the view of VxVM, select item 16 (
Prevent
multipathing/Suppress devices from VxVM’s view
) from the vxdiskadm main
menu. See “Disabling and enabling multipathing for specific devices” on page 127 for
details.
Changing the disk-naming scheme
Note: Devices with very long device names (for example, Fibre Channel devices that
include worldwide name (WWN) identifiers) are always represented by enclosure-based
names. The operation in this section has no effect on such devices.