This chapter explains how to convert your LVM configuration to a VxVM configuration.

The basic tools for conversion are the VxVM commands, vxvmconvert and vxdiskadm, and the LVM administrative utilities such as pvremove and vgcfgbackup. The discussion here details how to use these tools and gives some insights into how these tools work.

The disks on your system that are managed by LVM can be of two types: LVM disks in volume groups, and unused disks.

The former are disks that contain logical volumes and volume groups. Unused disks contain no user data, and are not used by any volume group, but have LVM disk headers written by pvcreate. Conversion is done differently for these two types of disks.

For unused LVM disks you can use a combination of pvremove and vxdiskadm. For LVM disks in volume groups, the primary tool for conversion is the vxvmconvert command. More information is available on the vxdiskadm command.

See the man page vxdiskadm(1M) or the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator's Guide.

The vxvmconvert utility is an interactive command. You can also use the vxautoanalysis command and the vxautoconvert command to perform non-interactive analysis and conversion of LVM volume groups. The vxautorollback command also lets you reverse the conversion, and turn a disk group back into a volume group.