All Veritas Volume Manager disk groups have an associated version number. Each VxVM release supports a specific set of disk group versions and can import and perform tasks on disk groups with those versions. Some new features and tasks work only on disk groups with the current disk group version.

When you upgrade, VxVM does not automatically upgrade the versions of existing disk groups. If the disk group is a supported version, the disk group can be used "as is", as long as you do not attempt to use the features of the current version. Until the disk group is upgraded, it may still be deported back to the release from which it was imported.

To use the features in the upgraded release, you must explicitly upgrade the existing disk groups. There is no "downgrade" facility. After you upgrade a disk group, the disk group is incompatible with earlier releases of VxVM that do not support the new version. For disk groups that are shared among multiple servers for failover or for off-host processing, verify that the VxVM release on all potential hosts that may use the disk group supports the disk group version to which you are upgrading.

After upgrading to Storage Foundation 5.1SP1, you must upgrade any existing disk groups that are organized by ISP. Without the version upgrade, configuration query operations continue to work fine. However, configuration change operations will not function correctly.

To list the version of a disk group, use this command:

# vxdg list dgname

You can also determine the disk group version by using the vxprint command with the -l format option.

To upgrade a disk group to the highest version supported by the release of VxVM that is currently running, use this command:

# vxdg upgrade dgname