Setting Up Disk Groups In Veritas Volume Manager

Good day,

Today we're going to take a look at the very basics of getting started with Veritas Volume Manager. We're not going to limit ourselves to any specific operating system, as all of these commands work almost exactly the same on Unix and Linux. We'll be using RedHat disk identifiers, for brevity's sake, but it should be noted that wherever we list out a disk like "sda," you can substitute c0t0d0 (or what not) if you're using Solaris. Of course, if you're running RedHat, you're probably already using LVM, in which case VVM might not be worth the hefty asking price.

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at creating volumes with these disk groups , but for now, I thing we'll be chewing up sufficient HTML landscape just running down these basic commands ;) We'll be concentrating on the command line functionality in this small series of posts. You can do all of this stuff using the "vxdiskadm" command also, which is a tty gui that pretty much walks you through the steps very easily in plain English.

Our assumptions for today's exercise (and tomorrow's), are that you have 6 disks on your system of equal size, manufacturer, etc, and that you've already installed and (at least temporarily) licensed Veritas Volume Manager on the OS. Our only other obvious assumption will be that you may or may not have installed the Veritas File System. These commands should work equally well for vxfs, ufs, ext3, etc.

The first thing you'll want to do to set up your disk group(s) is to initialize all of your disks so that Volume Manager recognizes them. This is very simply done on the command line, like so, for our six disks (/dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd, /etc/hde, /dev/hdf):

host # /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -if hda
host # /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -if hdb
host # /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -if hdc
host # /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -if hdd
host # /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -if hde
host # /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -if hdf

Note: For all of these operations, you can check on the progress (if you run a command that takes a good while to complete) using the "vxtask" command!

It's generally good practice to include /etc/vx/bin in your PATH environment variable (even on Linux, for backward compatability's sake). At the very least, it will save your fingers from type-cramping ;)

The command line options we've added here, before the disk name declarations (which don't need to be fully qualified with /dev... ), are "-i" to initialize the disks (by writing a disk header instead of just creating a partition for VVM use) and "-f" to force the initialization (This is technically an option to the "vxdisk" command, but can be used with "vxdisksetup").

Now, to create your disk group, or groups, you just simply have to run the following. Let's say we want to create two disk groups (disk_group1 and disk_group2); the first with hda and hdb, and the second with the remaining disks we've initialized. We can take care of that by executing:

host # /usr/sbin/vxdg init disk_group1 disk_group1_01=hda disk_group1_2=hdb
host # /usr/sbin/vxdg init disk_group2 disk_group2_01=hdc disk_group2_2=hdd disk_group2_3=hde disk_group2_4=hdf

We'll also create a disk group , called disk_group3, consisting of all 6 disks (Of course, it's not recommended to have any single Veritas disk belong to more than one disk group, but we're going to do it here, just so we have a disk group that we can use in tomorrow's examples on setting up volume groups).

hosts # /usr/sbin/vxdg init disk_group3 disk_group3_01=hda disk_group3_2=hdb disk_group3_3=hdc disk_group3_4=hdd disk_group3_5=hde disk_group3_6=hdf

And we're all set. Now all six of our disks are initialized for use with Veritas Volume Manager and we've got them ordered into disk groups.

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at creating different types of volumes from the disks, and disk groups, that we've set up today.

Until then,


, Mike

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