You can use the vxassist utility to create and modify volumes. Specify the basic requirements for volume creation or modification, and vxassist performs the necessary tasks.
The advantages of using vxassist rather than the advanced approach include:
Most actions require that you enter only one command rather than several.
You are required to specify only minimal information to vxassist. If necessary, you can specify additional parameters to modify or control its actions.
Operations result in a set of configuration changes that either succeed or fail as a group, rather than individually. System crashes or other interruptions do not leave intermediate states that you have to clean up. If vxassist finds an error or an exceptional condition, it exits after leaving the system in the same state as it was prior to the attempted operation.
vxassist obtains most of the information it needs from sources other than your input. vxassist obtains information about the existing objects and their layouts from the objects themselves.
For tasks requiring new disk space, vxassist seeks out available disk space and allocates it in the configuration that conforms to the layout specifications and that offers the best use of free space.
The vxassist command takes this form:
# vxassist [options] keyword volume [attributes...]
where keyword selects the task to perform. The first argument after a vxassist keyword, volume, is a volume name, which is followed by a set of desired volume attributes. For example, the keyword make allows you to create a new volume:
# vxassist [options] make volume length [attributes]
The length of the volume can be specified in sectors, kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes by using a suffix character of s, k, m, or g. If no suffix is specified, the size is assumed to be in sectors.
See the vxintro(1M) manual page.
Additional attributes can be specified as appropriate, depending on the characteristics that you wish the volume to have. Examples are stripe unit width, number of columns in a RAID-5 or stripe volume, number of mirrors, number of logs, and log type.
By default, the vxassist command creates volumes in a default disk group according to a set of rules.
To use a different disk group, specify the -g diskgroup option to vxassist.
A large number of vxassist keywords and attributes are available for use.
See the vxassist(1M) manual page.
The simplest way to create a volume is to use default attributes.
More complex volumes can be created with specific attributes by controlling how vxassist uses the available storage space.