Creating Multiple Volumes as a Volume Group

If you choose to create volumes individually, allocation may eventually fail when the available storage is exhausted. The -M option to the vxvoladm command allows you to create several volumes at the same time while making the most efficient use of the available storage resources. ISP automatically chooses the best way to allocate storage to the volumes. A set of multiple volumes that are created by this method is referred to as a volume group.

For convenience, it is easiest to define one or more volume groups in a definition file, and have vxvoladm read this file to create the volumes as shown here:

For a description of the syntax of a volume group definition, see Volume Group Definition Syntax.

A sample definition might contain the following volumegroup entry:

This specifies three 10-gigabyte mirrored volumes in the disk group, mydg, with the data mirrors placed on separate enclosures, but excluding enclosure, ENC1.

The next sample definition specifies a prefabricated striped volume on storage that is restricted to the location Room1, and a volume that is mirrored across controllers in the disk group testdg. In addition, the rules for the volume group specify that the volumes are to be created on separate enclosures, and that storage may only be allocated on disks from a given vendor.