During installation, it is possible to set up a variety of configurations for the root
(/
) and usr
file systems, and for swap
.
The following are some of the possible configurations for the /usr
file system:
usr
is a directory under /
and no separate partition is allocated for it. In this case, usr
becomes part of the rootvol
volume when the root disk is encapsulated and put under Veritas Volume Manager control.
usr
is on a separate partition from the root partition on the root disk . In this case, a separate volume is created for the usr
partition. vxmirror
mirrors the usr
volume on the destination disk.
usr
is on a disk other than the root disk. In this case, a volume is created for the usr
partition only if you use VxVM to encapsulate the disk. Note that encapsulating the root disk and having mirrors of the root volume is ineffective in maintaining the availability of your system if the separate usr
partition becomes inaccessible for any reason. For maximum availablility of the system, it is recommended that you encapsulate both the root disk and the disk containing the usr
partition, and have mirrors for the usr
, rootvol,
and swapvol
volumes.
The rootvol
volume must exist in the boot disk group.
There are other restrictions on the configuration of rootvol
and usr
volumes.
See the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator's Guide.
VxVM allows you to put swap
partitions on any disk; it does not need an initial swap
area during early phases of the boot process. By default, the Veritas Volume Manager installation chooses partition 0 on the selected root disk as the root
partition, and partition 1 as the swap
partition. However, it is possible to have the swap
partition on a partition not located on the root disk. In such cases, you are advised to encapsulate that disk and create mirrors for the swap
volume. If you do not do this, damage to the swap
partition eventually causes the system to crash. It may be possible to boot the system, but having mirrors for the swapvol
volume prevents system failures.