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Dissociating and removing plexes

When a plex is no longer needed, you can dissociate it from its volume and remove it as an object from VxVM. You might want to remove a plex for the following reasons:

• to provide free disk space
• to reduce the number of mirrors in a volume so you can increase the length of another mirror and its associated volume. When the plexes and subdisks are removed, the resulting space can be added to other volumes
• to remove a temporary mirror that was created to back up a volume and is no longer needed
• to change the layout of a plex

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    Caution   To save the data on a plex to be removed, the configuration of that plex must be known. Parameters from that configuration (stripe unit size and subdisk ordering) are critical to the creation of a new plex to contain the same data. Before a plex is removed, you must record its configuration. See Displaying plex information" for more information.

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To dissociate a plex from the associated volume and remove it as an object from VxVM, use the following command:

# vxplex [-g diskgroup] -o rm dis plex

For example, to dissociate and remove a plex named vol01-02 in the disk group, mydg, use the following command:

# vxplex -g mydg -o rm dis vol01-02

This command removes the plex vol01-02 and all associated subdisks.

Alternatively, you can first dissociate the plex and subdisks, and then remove them with the following commands:

# vxplex [-g diskgroup] dis plex

# vxedit [-g diskgroup] -r rm plex

When used together, these commands produce the same result as the vxplex -o rm dis command. The -r option to vxedit rm recursively removes all objects from the specified object downward. In this way, a plex and its associated subdisks can be removed by a single vxedit command.