Veritas™ Volume Manager Administrator's Guide

The method by which you place a disk under VxVM control depends on the following 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.

  Warning:

  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.

• VxVM requires that the disk that is to be placed under VxVM control should not have any file system created on it. If the disk has any file system on it, then you need to destroy the file system before placing the disk under VxVM control.

  For example, use the following commands to destroy the file system and initialize the disk:

  # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsk/diskname bs=1024k count=50
   # vxdisk scandisks
   # vxdisk -f init diskname

• 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.

  Note:

  This release only supports the conversion of LVM version 1 volume groups to VxVM. It does not support the conversion of LVM version 2 volume groups.

  See the Veritas Storage Foundation Advanced Features Administrator's 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.