Warning: |
Encapsulating a disk requires that the system be rebooted several times. Schedule performance of this procedure for a time when this does not inconvenience users. |
This section describes how to encapsulate a disk for use in VxVM. Encapsulation preserves any existing data on the disk when the disk is placed under VxVM control.
To prevent the encapsulation from failing, make sure that the following conditions apply:
The disk has two free partitions for the public and private regions.
The disk has an s2 slice.
The disk has a small amount of free space (at least 1 megabyte at the beginning or end of the disk) that does not belong to any partition. If the disk being encapsulated is the root disk, and this does not have sufficient free space available, a similar sized portion of the swap partition is used instead.
Only encapsulate a root disk if you also intend to mirror it. There is no benefit in root-disk encapsulation for its own sake.
Use the format or fdisk commands to obtain a printout of the root disk partition table before you encapsulate a root disk. For more information, see the appropriate manual pages. You may need this information should you subsequently need to recreate the original root disk.
You cannot grow or shrink any volume (rootvol, usrvol, varvol, optvol, swapvol, and so on) that is associated with an encapsulated root disk. This is because these volumes map to physical partitions on the disk, and these partitions must be contiguous.
When the boot disk is encapsulated or mirrored, a device path alias is added to the NVRAMRC in the SPARC EEPROM. These device aliases can be used to set the system's boot device.
For more information, see the devalias and boot-device settings in the SUN documentation.
To encapsulate a disk for use in VxVM
Your system may use device names that differ from the examples shown here.
At the following prompt, enter the disk device name for the disks to be encapsulated:
Select disk devices to encapsulate: [<pattern-list>,all,list,q,?] device name
The pattern-list can be a single disk, or a series of disks and/or controllers (with optional targets). If pattern-list consists of multiple items, those items must be separated by white space.
If you do not know the address (device name) of the disk to be encapsulated, enter l or list at the prompt for a complete listing of available disks.
Here is the disk selected. Output format: [Device] device name Continue operation? [y,n,q,?] (default: y) y
You can choose to add this disk to an existing disk group or to a new disk group. To create a new disk group, select a disk group name that does not yet exist. Which disk group [<group>,list,q,?]
Use a default disk name for the disk? [y,n,q,?] (default: y)
The selected disks will be encapsulated and added to the disk group name disk group with default disk names. device name Continue with operation? [y,n,q,?] (default: y) y
The following disk has been selected for encapsulation. Output format: [Device] device name Continue with encapsulation? [y,n,q,?] (default: y) y
A message similar to the following confirms that the disk is being encapsulated for use in VxVM and tells you that a reboot is needed:
The disk device device name will be encapsulated and added to the disk group diskgroup with the disk name diskgroup01.
Enter the desired format [cdsdisk,sliced,q,?] (default: cdsdisk)
Enter the format that is appropriate for your needs. In most cases, this is the default format, cdsdisk. Note that only the sliced format is suitable for use with root, boot or swap disks.
Enter desired private region length [<privlen>,q,?] (default: 65536)
Do you want to use sliced as the format should cdsdisk fail? [y,n,q,?] (default: y)
If you enter y, and it is not possible to encapsulate the disk as a CDS disk, it is encapsulated as a sliced disk. Otherwise, the encapsulation fails.
# shutdown -g0 -y -i6
The /etc/vfstab
file is updated to include the volume devices that are used to mount any encapsulated file systems. You may need to update any other references in backup scripts, databases, or manually created swap devices. The original /etc/vfstab
file is saved as /etc/vfstab.prevm
.
Encapsulate other disks? [y,n,q,?] (default: n) n
The default layout that is used to encapsulate disks can be changed.
More Information