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VXCONVERT (1M) |
Maintenance Commands |
The vxconvert script is interactive and prompts you for responses, supplying defaults where appropriate. There is a Help facility at every prompt. Enter a question mark (?) at a prompt to display a context-sensitive help message.
With vxconvert, you can identify LVM volume groups, list disks, analyze volume groups and file systems for conversion, and perform the conversion of LVM volume groups and JFS or JFS2 file systems to VxVM disk groups and VxFS file systems.
All disks in a volume group are converted together. You cannot use vxconvert to convert unused LVM disks (that are not part of an LVM volume group) to VxVM disks. To convert unused LVM disks, use the reducevg command to take the disk out of LVM control, and then use the vxdiskadm command to initialize the disk for VxVM use (see the reducevg(1M) and vxdiskadm(1M) manual pages for more information).
Note: You can only convert unmounted JFS or JFS2 file systems to VxFS file systems.
vxconvert changes disks within LVM volume groups to VxVM disks by replacing the areas of the disks that are used for LVM and JFS or JFS2 configuration information with the equivalent VxVM and VxFS configuration information. Portions of the disks that are used for user data, such as file systems and databases, are not affected by the conversion.
Note: The conversion process changes the names by which your system refers to the logical storage, so it must be carried out offline. No applications must be allowed to access data in the volume groups undergoing conversion. Unmount file systems that use those volumes, and shut down any applications, such as databases, that might use the volumes directly.
See the Veritas Foundation Suite Migration Guide for more information on conversion limitations.
Caution: Before conversion, clean and unmount all JFS and JFS2 file systems in the LVM volume groups that are to be converted. Conversion cannot be performed for mounted or dirty file systems. Make a full backup of all file systems, including JFS and JFS2 file systems, in the volume groups before starting the conversion process.
See the Veritas Foundation Suite Migration Guide for more information on the conversion procedure.
After committing the conversion of the LVM volume groups and JFS and JFS2 file systems to VxVM volumes and VxFS file systems, correct the names of the volume entries in the /etc/filesystems file, and run full a fsck check on the converted VxFS file systems.
Caution: Back up the data in the file systems before performing the conversion. The only way to reverse the conversion is to recreate the LVM volume and JFS and JFS2 file system configuration, and then restore the data from a backup.
See the Veritas Foundation Suite Migration Guide for more information on restoring an LVM volume group and JFS or JFS2 file system configuration.
During conversion, certain LVM, JFS and JFS2 metadata records must be saved. The largest of these records is the VGRA record for each physical volume in an LVM volume group. The default location for this record is /etc/vx/reconfig.d/disk.d, which is usually in the root file system. For small records, this is usually not a problem. However, when converting LVM volume groups with large VGDAs, the size of the VGRA for each physical volume may be more than 64 megabytes. For example, the space required to store the VGRAs for a 128-disk volume group could be over 8 gigabytes. As it is unlikely that a system has this much spare disk space in its root file system, use this option to specify a suitable alternative location.
Veritas Foundation Suite Migration Guide
Last updated: 1 Jun 2005
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