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Manual: Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide   

Overview of the vxvoladm Command

You can use the vxvoladm command to create and manage volumes. ISP optimally assigns storage resources as defined and constrained by any parameter values, rules, capabilities and templates that you specify as arguments to the command. Capabilities provide the highest, most abstract way of specifying volumes. Rules provide the lowest, most direct means of specification. This gives you great freedom to create volumes that meet your requirements.

The vxvoladm command takes the general form:


vxvoladm [optionskeyword volume [additional_arguments] \ 
  [storage_specification] [attribute=value ...]

The keyword denotes the action that vxvoladm is to perform on the named volume. The storage specification defines the storage that can or cannot be used with an operation. This consists of a comma-separated list of disk media names and other storage attributes, such as Controller:controller_name to indicate all disks on a controller. Excluded storage is indicated by a ! prefix. Finally, attributes and their values can be used to specify further constraints on the operation.

Each invocation of vxvoladm is applied to only a single storage pool that has been configured within a disk group. The default disk group is that aliased by the setting of defaultdg. You can specify an alternate disk group by using the -g diskgroup option.


Note   Note    Refer to the vxvoladm(1M) manual page for full details on using the vxvoladm command.

Setting Default Values for vxvoladm

You can define default values for vxvoladm in the file /etc/default/allocator, or in an alternate defaults file that you specify using the -d option. The defaults listed in this file are used unless they are overridden by a value specified on the command line. If a value is not defined in a defaults file or on the command line, vxvoladm uses a built-in default value.


Tip  Tip    The file, /etc/default/allocator_readme, contains a copy of the defaults file as it is shipped and first installed.

By default, the attribute settings in the installed /etc/default/allocator file are commented out. If required, you can uncomment the entries, and edit their values. If you do this, you should first make a backup copy of the original unedited file to keep for reference.

The following entry for default_rules in the /etc/default/allocator file is commented out by default:


# default_rules=desired confineto "ProductId"

If enabled, this rule changes the default behavior of ISP so that it attempts to confine volumes to disks with the same product ID. The rule may also prevent hot-relocation or volume transformation taking place if disks with the same product ID are not available.

For a single invocation of the vxvoladm command, you can override the default values of attributes that are defined in the /etc/default/allocator file, or that are built into vxvoladm, by specifying them as comma-separated arguments to the -o option.

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Product: Storage Foundation Guides  
Manual: Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide  
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