< Previous  | TOC | Index | Next  >

Disk device naming in VxVM

The following methods for naming disk devices exist:

• OS-based naming
• Enclosure-based naming

To display the native Linux device name of a VM disk (such as mydg01), use the following command:

# vxdisk path | egrep diskname

See "Renaming an enclosure" on page 166.

OS-based naming

In the OS-based naming scheme, all disk devices are named using the hdx[N] or sdx[N] format, where x is a letter that indicates the order of EIDE (hd) or SCSI (sd) disks seen by the operating system, and N is an optional partition number in the range 1 through 15.

Enclosure-based naming

Enclosure-based naming operates as follows:

• Devices with very long device names (for example, Fibre Channel devices that include worldwide name (WWN) identifiers) are always represented by enclosure-based names.
• All disks in supported disk arrays are named using the enclosure_name_# format. For example, disks in the supported disk array, enggdept are named enggdept_0, enggdept_1, enggdept_2 and so on. You can use the vxdmpadm command to administer enclosure names.

  See "Administering DMP using vxdmpadm" on page 150.

  See the vxdmpadm(1M) manual page.

• Disks in the DISKS category (JBOD disks) are named using the Disk_# format.
• A disk partition is indicated by appending s# to the name, where # is the partition number. For example, Disk_0s5 and Disk_0s6 indicate the extended partitions that are used for the private and public regions of the sliced disk, Disk_0, and ACME_0s5 indicates the extended partition for the simple disk, ACME_0. For CDS disks, partition 3 is used for both the private and public regions.

  See "Private and public disk regions" on page 80.

• Disks in the OTHER_DISKS category (disks that are not multipathed by DMP) cannot use this scheme, and are named using the hdx[N] or sdx[N] format.

See "Changing the disk-naming scheme" on page 93.

To display the native OS device names of a VM disk (such as mydg01), use the following command:

# vxdisk path | egrep diskname

See "Renaming an enclosure" on page 166.

See "Disk categories" on page 84.