Veritas™ Volume Manager Administrator's Guide

Creating tagged volumes

Volume tags are used to implement the SmartTier feature of the Storage Foundation software.

See the Veritas Storage Foundation Advanced Features Administrator's Guide.

You can use the tag attribute with the vxassist make command to set a named tag and optional tag value on a volume, for example:

# vxassist -b -g mydg make volmir 5g layout=mirror tag=mirvol=5g

To list the tags that are associated with a volume, use this command:

# vxassist [-g diskgroup] listtag volume

If you do not specify a volume name, the tags of all volumes and vsets in the disk group are listed.

The following is an example of listtag output:

# vxassist -g dgl listtag vol
TY  NAME             DISKGROUP        TAG
=================================================
v   vol              dg1              Symantec

To list the volumes that have a specified tag name, use this command:

# vxassist [-g diskgroup] list tag=tagname 

Tag names and tag values are case-sensitive character strings of up to 256 characters. Tag names can consist of letters (A through Z and a through z), numbers (0 through 9), dashes (-), underscores (_) or periods (.) from the ASCII character set. A tag name must start with either a letter or an underscore. Tag values can consist of any character from the ASCII character set with a decimal value from 32 through 127. If a tag value includes any spaces, use the vxassist settag command to set the tag on the newly created volume.

Dotted tag hierarchies are understood by the list operation. For example, the listing for tag=a.b includes all volumes that have tag names that start with a.b.

The tag names site, udid and vdid are reserved and should not be used. To avoid possible clashes with future product features, it is recommended that tag names do not start with any of the following strings: asl, be, isp, nbu, sf, symc, vx, or vxvm.attr.

See Setting tags on volumes.

You can use the tier attribute with the vxassist make command to set the vxfs.placement_class. tag on the volume being created. This attribute lets you set the volume tier that SmartTier will use. The following command adds tier1 to the vxfs.placement_class tag.

# vxassist  -g dg3 make vol4 5g tier=tier2

The following command confirms that the vxfs.placement_class tag has been updated.

# vxassist  -g dg3 listtag

TY  NAME             DISKGROUP        TAG
=========================================================
v   vol4             dg3              vxfs.placement_class.tier2