Creating a Volume

You can create volumes using an advanced approach, an assisted approach, or the rule-based storage allocation approach that is provided by the Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP) feature. Each method uses different tools. You may switch between the advanced and the assisted approaches at will. However, volumes that you have created using ISP may only be modified using ISP-specific tools such as vxvoladm. For more information about ISP, see the VERITAS Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide.

Advanced Approach

The advanced approach consists of a number of commands that typically require you to specify detailed input. These commands use a "building block" approach that requires you to have a detailed knowledge of the underlying structure and components to manually perform the commands necessary to accomplish a certain task. Advanced operations are performed using several different VxVM commands.

The steps to create a volume using this approach are:

1. Create subdisks using vxmake sd; see Creating Subdisks.
2. Create plexes using vxmake plex, and associate subdisks with them; see Creating Plexes, Associating Subdisks with Plexes and Creating a Volume Using vxmake.
3. Associate plexes with the volume using vxmake vol; see Creating a Volume Using vxmake.
4. Initialize the volume using vxvol start or vxvol init zero; see Initializing and Starting a Volume Created Using vxmake.

See Creating a Volume Using a vxmake Description File for an example of how you can combine steps 1 through 3 using a volume description file with vxmake.

See Creating a Volume Using vxmake for an example of how to perform steps 2 and 3 to create a RAID-5 volume.