Veritas™ Volume Manager Administrator's Guide

Creating a volume using a vxmake description file

You can use the vxmake command to add a new volume, plex or subdisk to the set of objects managed by VxVM. vxmake adds a record for each new object to the VxVM configuration database. You can create records either by specifying parameters to vxmake on the command line, or by using a file which contains plain-text descriptions of the objects. The file can also contain commands for performing a list of tasks. Use the following form of the command to have vxmake read the file from the standard input:

# vxmake [-g diskgroup] < description_file

Alternatively, you can specify the file to vxmake using the -d option:

# vxmake [-g diskgroup] -d description_file

The following sample description file defines a volume, db, with two plexes, db-01 and db-02:

#rty #name       #options
sd   mydg03-01   disk=mydg03 offset=0 len=10000
sd   mydg03-02   disk=mydg03 offset=25000 len=10480
sd   mydg04-01   disk=mydg04 offset=0 len=8000
sd   mydg04-02   disk=mydg04 offset=15000 len=8000
sd   mydg04-03   disk=mydg04 offset=30000 len=4480
plex db-01       layout=STRIPE ncolumn=2 stwidth=16k
                 sd=mydg03-01:0/0,mydg03-02:0/10000,mydg04-01:1/0,
mydg04-02:1/8000,mydg04-03:1/16000
sd   ramd1-01    disk=ramd1 len=640
                 comment="Hot spot for dbvol"
plex db-02       sd=ramd1-01:40320
vol  db          usetype=gen plex=db-01,db-02
                 readpol=prefer prefname=db-02
                 comment="Uses mem1 for hot spot in last 5m"

The subdisk definition for plex, db-01, must be specified on a single line. It is shown here split across two lines because of space constraints.

The first plex, db-01, is striped and has five subdisks on two physical disks, mydg03 and mydg04. The second plex, db-02, is the preferred plex in the mirror, and has one subdisk, ramd1-01, on a volatile memory disk.

For detailed information about how to use vxmake, refer to the vxmake(1M) manual page.

After creating a volume using vxmake, you must initialize it before it can be used.