VxVM System Administrator's Guide

Preface

The VERITAS® Volume Manager System Administrator's Guide provides fairly advanced information on the Volume Manager (VxVM®) and how to use it.

Audience

This guide is intended for system administrators responsible for installing, configuring, and maintaining systems under the control of the VERITAS Volume Manager.

This guide assumes that the user has a:

working knowledge of the UNIX operating system
basic understanding of system administration
basic understanding of volume management

Scope

The purpose of this guide is to provide the system administrator with a thorough knowledge of the procedures and concepts involved with volume management and system administration using the Volume Manager. This guide includes guidelines on how to take advantage of various VxVM features, instructions on how to use VxVM commands to create and manipulate VxVM objects, and information on how to recover from disk failures.

Organization

This guide is organized as follows:

Chapter 1, "Description of the Volume Manager," is an overview of the VERITAS Volume Manager and related concepts. This chapter also includes an introduction to arrays and Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID).
Chapter 2, "VxVM Performance Monitoring," provides performance management and configuration guidelines for use with VxVM.
Chapter 3, "Disk and Disk Group Administration," discusses disk and disk group administration using the Volume Manager.
Chapter 4, "Volume Administration," discusses how to use various Volume Manager utilities to manipulate VxVM objects.
Appendix A, "Volume Manager Error Messages," contains a list of error messages generated by VxVM, accompanied by a description of each message and a suggested user action.
Appendix B, "Recovery," describes how to preserve and recover data with the help of VxVM. It discusses ways to prevent data loss and/or loss of system availability due to disk failure.
The "Glossary" defines various terms associated with the Volume Manager.

Using This Guide

This guide contains instructions for performing Volume Manager system administration functions. Volume Manager administration functions can be performed via one or more of the following interfaces:

a set of commands
a single automated command (vxassist)
a menu-driven interface (vxdiskadm)
the Visual Administrator graphical user interface

This guide focuses on using the VxVM command line interface for Volume Manager administration. Details on how to use the Visual Administrator and the vxdiskadm menu interface are located in the VERITAS Volume Manager User's Guide. Detailed descriptions of the VxVM utilities, the options for each utility, and details on how to use them are located in the Volume Manager manual pages.

Note: Most of the Volume Manager commands require appropriate privileges.

The following are guidelines for using this guide:

It is strongly recommended that you refer to Chapter 1 for important overview information on the Volume Manager.
For guidelines on how to take advantage of various VxVM features (such as striping, mirroring, and RAID-5), refer to Chapter 2.
For detailed information on how to use VxVM commands to perform various operations on disks, volumes, plexes, and subdisks, refer to Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.
Use Appendix A as a reference for explanations of various VxVM error messages.
For detailed information on how to recover from various types of failures, refer to Appendix B. This appendix also contains some suggestions on how to avoid data loss and loss of system access.
For definitions of terms associated with the Volume Manager, refer to the Glossary.

Conventions

The following table describes the typographic conventions used in this guide.

Typographic Conventions
Typeface	Usage	Examples
`courier`	Computer output; user input; names of commands, files, and directories	`$ You have mail.` The `cat` command displays files. `$ ls -a`
italics	New terms; document titles; words to be emphasized; variables to be substituted with a real name or value	`$ cat filename` Refer to the User's Guide for details.
bold	Glossary terms