VERITAS Volume Manager Requirements

Review the following Volume Manager-related items before installing or upgrading VERITAS Storage Foundation or VERITAS Volume Manager.

Taking a Disk Inventory

Selecting Disks

Decide which disks you want to place under VxVM control. The other disks in your configuration are not affected. Disks may be brought under VxVM control in two ways:

• Root disks---Data in all existing file systems and partitions on the disk are preserved.
• Initialized disks---Data on the disks is removed.

Verifying Disk Contents

Verify the disk contents. Answer the following questions and list the data for your convenience.

1. Make sure you are aware of the contents of each disk. Determine which disks can be initialized (destroying any existing data on the disks).
2. Do you want to place the system root disk under VxVM control? _________________________________________________________________________
3. Do you want to initialize all disks on a controller together? Identify the controllers (for example c0t0d0) - where c0t0d0 represents a disk on controller c0.
   _________________________________________________________________________
   
   _________________________________________________________________________
   
   _________________________________________________________________________
   
4. Identify the disks to be initialized or excluded in a table similar to the following.

   Disk ID	Initialize, Exclude

Excluding Disks

It is possible to configure the vxdiskadm utility not to list certain disks or controllers as being available. For example, this may be useful in a SAN environment where disk enclosures are visible to a number of separate systems.

To exclude a device from the view of VxVM, select item 16 (Prevent multipathing/Suppress devices from VxVM's view) from the vxdiskadm main menu. See "Disabling and Enabling Multipathing for Specific Devices" in the "Administering Dynamic Multipathing (DMP)" chapter of the VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator's Guide for details.

Array Support Libraries (ASL)

VxVM provides support for new disk arrays in the form of Array Support Library (ASL) software packages. You can obtain ASL packages from:

• The VxVM release package
• The disk array provided by the vendor
• The VERITAS Technical Support site, http://support.veritas.com

For further information on supported ASLs and installing ASLs, see the VERITAS Volume Manager Hardware Notes.

Disabling Hot-Relocation

The hot-relocation feature detects disk failure automatically, notifies you of the nature of the failure, attempts to relocate any affected subdisks that are redundant, and initiates recovery procedures.

The hot-relocation feature is enabled by default and it is recommended that you leave it on. However, if you need to disable it for some reason (for example, you do not want the free space on some of your disks used for relocation), you can do so by preventing the vxrelocd daemon from starting during system startup. Disable hot-relocation only after you install the VERITAS Volume Manager packages.

  To disable hot-relocation

1. Comment out the vxrelocd line in the startup file /sbin/rc2.d/S096vxvm-recover, as follows:
     # vxrelocd root &
2. After editing the file, you can kill the vxrelocd process or reboot the system.

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     Note    If you disable hot-relocation, you are not notified by electronic mail of any failures that occur. This is because vxrelocd is responsible for notifying the system administrator of failures.

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For more information on hot-relocation and vxrelocd, refer to the vxrelocd (1M) manual page.

VERITAS Enterprise Administrator

The VERITAS Storage Foundation software must be installed and run on an HP-UX machine. The VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA) client can be installed and run on any HP-UX, Windows XP, Windows NT, Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows 98 machine that supports the Java Runtime Environment.

VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA) is required to access the graphical user interface (GUI) for VERITAS Storage Foundation. You can use the GUI to administer disks, volumes, file systems, and database functionality on local or remote machines.

One of the following packages needs to be installed and running on the client:

• VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VRTSobgui)

This is the client package for HP-UX.

• VERITAS Enterprise Administrator for Windows (windows/VRTSobgui.msi)

This is the client package for Windows.

Check the VERITAS Storage Foundation Release Notes for any patch information before you install VEA.

Requirements

The following are system recommendations for the GUI:

Cluster Environment Requirements

If your configuration has a cluster, which is a set of hosts that share a set of disks, follow these steps:

1. If you plan to place the root disk group under VxVM control, decide into which disk group you want to configure it for each node in the cluster. The root disk group, usually aliased as bootdg, contains the volumes that are used to boot the system. VxVM sets bootdg to the appropriate disk group if it takes control of the root disk. Otherwise bootdg is set to nodg. To check the name of the disk group, enter the command:
   # vxdg bootdg
2. Decide on the layout of shared disk groups. There may be one or more shared disk groups. Determine how many you wish to use.
3. If you plan to use Dirty Region Logging (DRL) with VxVM in a cluster, leave a small amount of space on the disk for these logs. The log size is proportional to the volume size and the number of nodes. Refer to the VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator's Guide and the VERITAS Storage Foundation Cross-Platform Data Sharing Administrator's Guide for more information on DRL.
4. Install the license that supports the clustering feature on every node in the cluster. For more information on enabling clustering, see Enabling Cluster Support in VxVM (Optional).