An important feature of disk groups is that they can be moved between systems. If all disks in a disk group are moved from one system to another, then the disk group can be used by the second system. You do not have to re-specify the configuration.
To move a disk group between systems
This can require a reboot, in which case the vxconfigd
daemon is restarted and recognizes the new disks. If you do not reboot, use the command vxdctl
enable
to restart the vxconfigd
program so VxVM also recognizes the disks.
Caution All disks in the disk group must be moved to the other system. If they are not moved, the import fails.
You can also move disks from a system that has crashed. In this case, you cannot deport the disk group from the first system. When a disk group is created or imported on a system, that system writes a lock on all disks in the disk group.
Caution The purpose of the lock is to ensure that dual-ported disks (disks that can be accessed simultaneously by two systems) are not used by both systems at the same time. If two systems try to access the same disks at the same time, this must be managed using software such as the clustering functionality of VxVM. Otherwise, configuration information stored on the disk may be corrupted, and the data on the disk may become unusable.