Displaying the paths to a disk

The vxdisk command is used to display the multi-pathing information for a particular metadevice. The metadevice is a device representation of a physical disk having multiple physical paths through the system's HBA controllers. In DMP, all the physical disks in the system are represented as metadevices with one or more physical paths.

To display the multi-pathing information on a system

To view multi-pathing information for a particular metadevice

  1. Use the following command to view multi-pathing information for the specified device:
    # vxdisk list devicename

    For example, the command output displays multi-pathing information for the device sdl as follows:

    # vxdisk list sdl
    Device:    sdl
    devicetag: sdl
    type:      sliced
    hostid:    system01
    .
    .
    .
    Multipathing information:
    numpaths:   2
    sdl   state=enabled     type=secondary
    sdp   state=disabled    type=primary

    In the sample output above, the numpaths line shows that there are 2 paths to the device. The next two lines in the "Multipathing information" section show that one path is active (state=enabled) and that the other path has failed (state=disabled).

    The type field is shown for disks on Active/Passive type disk arrays such as the EMC CLARiiON, Hitachi HDS 9200 and 9500, Sun StorEdge 6xxx, and Sun StorEdge T3 array. This field indicates the primary and secondary paths to the disk.

    The type field is not displayed for disks on Active/Active type disk arrays such as the EMC Symmetrix, Hitachi HDS 99xx and Sun StorEdge 99xx Series, and IBM ESS Series. Such arrays have no concept of primary and secondary paths.

  2. Alternately, you can use the following command to view multi-pathing information:
    # vxdmpadm getsubpaths dmpnodename=devicename

    For example, to view multi-pathing information for emc_clariion0_893, use the following command:

    # vxdmpadm getsubpaths dmpnodename=emc_clariion0_893
    
    NAME     STATE[A]   PATH-TYPE[M] CTLR-NAME  ENCLR-TYPE   ENCLR-NAME     ATTRS
    ==============================================================================
    sdbc     ENABLED(A)  PRIMARY      c3        EMC_CLARiiON  emc_clariion0     -
    sdbm     ENABLED     SECONDARY    c3        EMC_CLARiiON  emc_clariion0     -
    sdbw     ENABLED(A)  PRIMARY      c3        EMC_CLARiiON  emc_clariion0     -
    sdck     ENABLED(A)  PRIMARY      c2        EMC_CLARiiON  emc_clariion0     -
    sdcu     ENABLED     SECONDARY    c2        EMC_CLARiiON  emc_clariion0     -
    sdde     ENABLED(A)  PRIMARY      c2        EMC_CLARiiON  emc_clariion0     -

More Information

About displaying Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) information