Shredding a VxVM disk


Shredding a VxVM disk
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When you decommission a Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) disk that contains sensitive data, VxVM provides the ability to shred the data on the disk.

Note the following requirements:

VxVM does not shred a disk that is in use by VxVM on this system or in a shared disk group.
VxVM does not currently support shredding of thin-reclaimable LUNs. If you attempt to start the shred operation on a thin-reclaimable disk, VxVM displays a warning message and skips the disk.
VxVM does not shred a disk that is not a VxVM disk.
VxVM does not shred a disk that is mounted.
Symantec does not recommend shredding solid state drives (SSDs). To shred SSD devices, use the shred operation with the force (-f) option.

See About shredding data.

Caution:

All data on the disk will be lost when you shred the disk. Make sure that the information has been backed up onto another storage medium and verified, or that it is no longer needed.

To shred a VxVM disk

To shred the disk:

# /etc/vx/bin/vxdiskunsetup [-Cf] -o shred[=1|3|7] disk...

Where:

The force option (-f) permits you to shred Solid State Drives (SSDs).

1, 3 and 7 are the shred options corresponding to the number of passes. The default number of passes is 1.

disk... represents one or more disk names. If you specify multiple disk names, the vxdiskunsetup command processes them sequentially, one at a time.

For example:

# /etc/vx/bin/vxdiskunsetup -o shred=3 hds9970v0_14
disk_shred: Shredding disk hds9970v0_14 with type 3 
disk_shred: Disk raw size 2097807360 bytes
disk_shred: Writing 32010 (65536 byte size) pages and 0 bytes 
to disk
disk_shred: Wipe Pass 0: Pattern 0x3e
disk_shred: Wipe Pass 1: Pattern 0xca 
disk_shred: Wipe Pass 2: Pattern 0xe2
disk_shred: Shred passed random verify of 131072 bytes at 
offset 160903168

The vxdiskunsetup shred command sets up a new task.

You can monitor the progress of the shred operation with the vxtask command.
For example:
```
# vxtask list
TASKID PTID TYPE/STATE  PCT    PROGRESS
   203   -  DISKSHRED/R 90.16% 0/12291840/11081728 DISKSHRED 
nodg nodg
```
You can pause, abort, or resume the shred task. You cannot throttle the shred task.

See vxtask(1m)
If the disk shred operation fails, the disk may go into an error state with no label.
See Failed disk shred operation results in a disk with no label.

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