Creating a Volume Using vxmake

As an alternative to using vxassist, you can create a volume using the vxmake command to arrange existing subdisks into plexes, and then to form these plexes into a volume. Subdisks can be created using the method described in Creating Subdisks. The example given in this section is to create a RAID-5 volume using vxmake.

Creating a RAID-5 plex for a RAID-5 volume is similar to creating striped plexes, except that the layout attribute is set to raid5. Subdisks can be implicitly associated in the same way as with striped plexes. For example, to create a four-column RAID-5 plex with a stripe unit size of 32 sectors, use the following command:

Note that because four subdisks are specified, but the number of columns is not specified, the vxmake command assumes a four-column RAID-5 plex and places one subdisk in each column. Striped plexes are created using the same method except that the layout is specified as stripe. If the subdisks are to be created and added later, use the following command to create the plex:

If each column in a RAID-5 plex is to be created from multiple subdisks which may span several physical disks, you can specify to which column each subdisk should be added. For example, to create a three-column RAID-5 plex using six subdisks, use the following form of the vxmake command:

This command stacks subdisks mydg00-00 and mydg03-00 consecutively in column 0, subdisks mydg01-00 and mydg04-00 consecutively in column 1, and subdisks mydg02-00 and mydg05-00 in column 2. Offsets can also be specified to create sparse RAID-5 plexes, as for striped plexes.

Log plexes may be created as default concatenated plexes by not specifying a layout, for example:

To create a RAID-5 volume, specify the usage type to be RAID-5 using the following command:

RAID-5 plexes and RAID-5 log plexes are associated with the volume raidvol using the following command:

After creating a volume using vxmake, you must initialize it before it can be used. The procedure is described in Initializing and Starting a Volume.

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:

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

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

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. The procedure is described in Initializing and Starting a Volume Created Using vxmake.