Veritas™ Volume Manager Administrator's Guide
- Understanding Veritas Volume Manager
- VxVM and the operating system
- How VxVM handles storage management
- Volume layouts in VxVM
- Online relayout
- Volume resynchronization
- Dirty region logging
- Volume snapshots
- FastResync
- Provisioning new usable storage
- Administering disks
- Disk devices
- Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
- Discovering disks and dynamically adding disk arrays
- How to administer the Device Discovery Layer
- Changing the disk-naming scheme
- Adding a disk to VxVM
- Rootability
- Displaying disk information
- Removing disks
- Removing and replacing disks
- Administering Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- How DMP works
- Administering DMP using vxdmpadm
- Gathering and displaying I/O statistics
- Specifying the I/O policy
- Online dynamic reconfiguration
- Reconfiguring a LUN online that is under DMP control
- Creating and administering disk groups
- About disk groups
- Displaying disk group information
- Creating a disk group
- Importing a disk group
- Moving disk groups between systems
- Handling cloned disks with duplicated identifiers
- Handling conflicting configuration copies
- Reorganizing the contents of disk groups
- Destroying a disk group
- Creating and administering subdisks and plexes
- Displaying plex information
- Reattaching plexes
- Creating volumes
- Types of volume layouts
- Creating a volume
- Using vxassist
- Creating a volume on specific disks
- Creating a mirrored volume
- Creating a striped volume
- Creating a volume using vxmake
- Initializing and starting a volume
- Using rules and persistent attributes to make volume allocation more efficient
- Administering volumes
- Displaying volume information
- Monitoring and controlling tasks
- Reclamation of storage on thin reclamation arrays
- Stopping a volume
- Resizing a volume
- Adding a mirror to a volume
- Preparing a volume for DRL and instant snapshots
- Adding traditional DRL logging to a mirrored volume
- Enabling FastResync on a volume
- Performing online relayout
- Adding a RAID-5 log
- Creating and administering volume sets
- Configuring off-host processing
- Administering hot-relocation
- How hot-relocation works
- Moving relocated subdisks
- Administering cluster functionality (CVM)
- Overview of clustering
- Multiple host failover configurations
- CVM initialization and configuration
- Dirty region logging in cluster environments
- Administering VxVM in cluster environments
- Changing the CVM master manually
- Importing disk groups as shared
- Administering sites and remote mirrors
- About sites and remote mirrors
- Fire drill - testing the configuration
- Changing the site name
- Administering the Remote Mirror configuration
- Failure and recovery scenarios
- Performance monitoring and tuning
- Appendix A. Using Veritas Volume Manager commands
- Appendix B. Configuring Veritas Volume Manager
Handling cloned disks with duplicated identifiers
A disk may be copied by creating a hardware snapshot (such as an EMC BCV™ or Hitachi ShadowCopy™) or clone, by using dd or a similar command to replicate the disk, or by building a new LUN from the space that was previously used by a deleted LUN. To avoid the duplicate disk ID condition, the default action of VxVM is to prevent such duplicated disks from being imported.
Advanced disk arrays provide hardware tools that you can use to create clones of existing disks outside the control of VxVM. For example, these disks may have been created as hardware snapshots or mirrors of existing disks in a disk group. As a result, the VxVM private region is also duplicated on the cloned disk. When the disk group containing the original disk is subsequently imported, VxVM detects multiple disks that have the same disk identifier that is defined in the private region. In releases prior to 5.0, if VxVM could not determine which disk was the original, it would not import such disks into the disk group. The duplicated disks would have to be re-initialized before they could be imported.
From release 5.0, a unique disk identifier (UDID) is added to the disk's private region when the disk is initialized or when the disk is imported into a disk group (if this identifier does not already exist). Whenever a disk is brought online, the current UDID value that is known to the Device Discovery Layer (DDL) is compared with the UDID that is set in the disk's private region. If the UDID values do not match, the udid_mismatch flag is set on the disk. This flag can be viewed with the vxdisk list command. This allows a LUN snapshot to be imported on the same host as the original LUN. It also allows multiple snapshots of the same LUN to be simultaneously imported on a single server, which can be useful for off-host backup and processing.
A new set of vxdisk and vxdg operations are provided to handle such disks; either by writing the DDL value of the UDID to a disk's private region, or by tagging a disk and specifying that it is a cloned disk to the vxdg import operation.
The following is sample output from the vxdisk list command showing that disks c2t66d0, c2t67d0 and c2t68d0 are marked with the udid_mismatch flag:
# vxdisk list DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS c0t06d0 auto:cdsdisk - - online c0t16d0 auto:cdsdis - - online . . . c2t64d0 auto:cdsdisk - - online c2t65d0 auto:cdsdisk - - online c2t66d0 auto:cdsdisk - - online udid_mismatch c2t67d0 auto:cdsdisk - - online udid_mismatch c2t68d0 auto:cdsdisk - - online udid_mismatch