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Discovering disks and dynamically adding disk arrays

You can dynamically add support for a new type of disk array which has been developed by a third-party vendor. The support comes in the form of vendor-supplied libraries, and is added toa Solarissystem by using the pkgadd command.

Disk categories

Disk arrays that have been certified for use with Veritas Volume Manager are supported by an array support library (ASL), and are categorized by the vendor ID string that is returned by the disks (for example, "HITACHI").

Disks in JBODs for which DMP (see Administering dynamic multipathing (DMP)) can be supported in Active/Active mode, and which are capable of being multipathed, are placed in the DISKS category. Disks in unsupported arrays can be placed in this category by following the steps given in Adding unsupported disk arrays to the DISKS category.

Disks in JBODs that do not fall into any supported category, and which are not capable of being multipathed by DMP are placed in the OTHER_DISKS category.

Adding support for a new disk array

The following example illustrates how to add support for a new disk array named vrtsda to a Solarissystem using a vendor-supplied package on a mounted CD-ROM:

# pkgadd -d /cdrom/pkgdir vrtsda

The new disk array does not need to be already connected to the system when the package is installed. If any of the disks in the new disk array are subsequently connected, and if vxconfigd is running, vxconfigd immediately invokes the Device Discovery function and includes the new disks in the VxVM device list.

Enabling discovery of new devices

To have VxVM discover a new disk array, use the following command:

# vxdctl enable

This command scans all of the disk devices and their attributes, updates the VxVM device list, and reconfigures DMP with the new device database. There is no need to reboot the host.

  Note   This command ensures that dynamic multipathing is set up correctly on the array. Otherwise, VxVM treats the independent paths to the disks as separate devices, which can result in data corruption.

Removing support for a disk array

To remove support for the vrtsda disk array, use the following command:

# pkgrm vrtsda

If the arrays remain physically connected to the host after support has been removed, they are listed in the OTHER_DISKS category, and the volumes remain available.