HP XP P9000 Provisioning for Mainframe Systems User Guide

When formatting all LDEVs in a parity group, you will need to:
• Specify a parity group.
• Format the LDEV.
Before formatting all LDEVs in a parity group, make sure that all LDEVs under this parity group
have been blocked.
See “Blocking an LDEV” (page 45) for blocking an internal volume. See the HP XP P9000 External
Storage for Open and Mainframe Systems User Guide for blocking an external volume.
1. Select the parity group containing the LDEV to be formatted.
2. Click Format LDEVs.
3. In the Format LDEVs window, select the format type from the Format Type list, and then click
Finish.
In the Confirm window, click Next to go to the next operation.
4. Click Apply.
If Go to tasks window for status is checked, the Tasks window opens.
Making external mainframe system volumes usable
To use external mainframe volumes with a storage system, usually you must use External Storage
to perform external volume mapping, and then use the Format command of Virtual LVI to format
the volumes. However, formatting the external mainframe system volumes in this way may take a
lot of time.
If you want to make the external mainframe volumes usable more quickly, you can use an alternate
method:
• “Registering external volumes” (page 50)
• “Overwriting control blocks in specific external volumes” (page 51)
Registering external volumes
Using this procedure, you can make the external mainframe system volumes usable more quickly.
When the external volume is disconnected, you cannot register the external volume.
1. Perform zero-formatting on the external mainframe system volumes.
Zero-formatting writes 0’s in the entire disk area, formatting the entire disk area. For information
about how to perform zero-formatting, see the documentation for your mainframe system or
external storage system.
2. Map the zero-formatted external volumes using External Storage to register the volume in the
external volume group. For more information, see the HP XP P9000 External Storage for Open
and Mainframe Systems User Guide.
Non-zero-formatted external volumes must not be registered in the external groups. If the
external volumes are registered, performing the next step (step 3) will block and disable the
volumes to be read and written from the host. To make the non-zero-formatted external volumes
usable with P9500, use the Format command of Virtual LVI.
3. Specify the external volumes to overwrite the control blocks of the external volumes in the
group (see “Overwriting control blocks in specific external volumes” (page 51)). A control
block, which is a kind of volume area, is used to store information other than the user's data.
Only the storage administrator is authorized to overwrite the control blocks.
After overwriting completes, the external volumes are available for use in the storage system.
You can perform the following tasks while the LDEV is formatted, but only when the storage system
is, by default, set to making the increased volumes blocked instead of formatting them automatically.
50 Configuring custom-sized provisioning