Exporting a disk for Flexible Storage Sharing
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Exporting a disk for Flexible Storage Sharing

To use disks that are not physically shared across all nodes of a cluster (disks that are connected to one or more nodes of the cluster), the disks must first be exported for network sharing. Exporting a device makes the device available to all nodes in the cluster. The vxdisk command lets you export or unexport one or more disks for or from network sharing.

Note:

To ensure data protection, FSS uses PGR-based data disk fencing. For disks that are purely locally attached, fencing is implicitly handled within FSS, since all the I/Os to the disk go through the node to which the disk is directly connected. Therefore, devices that do not support SCSI3 PGR are supported with FSS with fencing. For disks that are connected to multiple hosts but do not support SCSI3 PGR, there is no way to ensure that fencing is enabled and thus this configuration is not supported when fencing is enabled.

The following command exports one or more disks for network sharing:

# vxdisk export accessname1 accessname2

where accessname1 and accessname2 are the access names of the disks you want to export for network sharing.

In addition, you can use the -o alldisks and -o local options to export all local and all shared disks, and all locally connected disks, respectively.

Note:

Boot disks, opaque disks, disks part of imported or deported disks groups, and non-VxVM disks cannot be exported.

Alternately, the following command unexports one or more disks from network sharing:

# vxdisk unexport accessname1 accessname2

where accessname1 and accessname2 are the disk access names of the disks you want to unexport from network sharing.

In addition, you can use the -o alldisks and -o local options to unexport all local and shared disks, and all locally connected disks, respectively.

Disks can also be configured for FSS by exporting them during initialization using the vxdisksetup and vxdisk init commands.

Initialize the disks with network sharing enabled, using one of the following commands:

# vxdisksetup -i disk_address export
# vxdisk [-f] init accessname export

where disk_address is the device that corresponds to the disk being operated on and accessname is the system-specific name that relates to the disk address.

After exporting a disk, you can use the vxdisk list and vxprint commands to list network shared disks, and identify disks that are remote to the node on which you run the command.

See Displaying exported disks and network shared disk groups.

Once a disk is exported, you can create shared disk groups using any combination of network shared disks and physically shared disks. Before adding a disk to a disk group, the Flexible Storage Sharing attribute needs to be set on the shared disk group.

See Setting the Flexible Storage Sharing attribute on a disk group.

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