Caution Do not use the procedure in this section to encapsulate a root disk. Part of the swap area on a root disk can be used to form the private region.
Encapsulation converts existing partitions on a specified disk to volumes. If any partitions contain file systems, their /etc/vfstab
entries are modified so the file systems are mounted on volumes instead.
Disk encapsulation requires that enough free space be available on the disk (by default, 1 megabyte) for storing the private region that VxVM uses for disk identification and configuration information. This free space cannot be included in any other partitions. (See the vxencap
(1M) manual page for more information.)
You can encapsulate a disk that does not have space available for the VxVM private region partition by using the vxdisk
utility. This is done by configuring the disk as a nopriv
devices that does not have a private region.
# vxdisk define
partition-device type=nopriv
where partition-device is the basename of the device in the /dev/dsk
directory. For example, to map partition 3
of disk device c0t4d0
, use the following command:
# vxdisk define c0t4d0s3 type=nopriv
To create volumes for other partitions on the disk
vxassist
to create a volume with that length.
Note
By default, vxassist
re-initializes the data area of a volume that it creates. If there is data to be preserved on the partition, do not use vxassist
. Instead, create the volume with vxmake
and start the volume with the command vxvol
init
active
.
The drawback with using nopriv
devices is that VxVM cannot track changes in the address or controller of the disk. Normally, VxVM uses identifying information stored in the private region on the physical disk to track changes in the location of a physical disk. Because nopriv
devices do not have private regions and have no identifying information stored on the physical disk, tracking cannot occur.
One use of nopriv
devices is to encapsulate a disk so that you can use VxVM to move data off the disk. When space has been made available on the disk, remove the nopriv
device, and encapsulate the disk as a standard disk device.
Note
A disk group cannot be formed entirely from nopriv
devices. This is because nopriv
devices do not provide space for storing disk group configuration information. Configuration information must be stored on at least one disk in the disk group.