Check the VxVM information after initializing the new disk. The screen shot below illustrates all the disks on the server along with their corresponding partition tables. Note that disks sdb and sdc are partitioned in the same manner since they were both set up with the vxdisksetup command.

The screen shot below shows the VxVM hierarchy for existing storage objects. Remember that we are working with a live and running server. We are using a logical disk group called PDDG which has other storage objects subordinate to it. The most important storage object here is the volume which is called Storage. The volume name can be any arbitrary name that you want, but for this example, the volume name is "Storage". The volume object is denoted by "v" in the output of the vxprint command. Other objects are subdisks (sd) which represents a single contiguous range of blocks on a single LUN. The other object here is a plex ("pl") which represents the virtual object or container to which the OS reads and writes. In vxprint, the length values are expressed in sectors, which in Linux are 512 bytes each. The raw volume size is 377487360 sectors in length, or when multiplied by 512 bytes (512*377487360) is 193273528320 bytes, or about 193 GB(2).

Notice that when the new disk was added it was 213GB yet the original existing Storage volume was 250GB. The Storage volume had to first be shrunk to a size equal the same (or smaller) number of sectors as the disk to which it would be mirrored.

The original physical disk ("dm") that has been grouped into the PDDG diskgroup is called sdb but we have assigned the internal name OLDDISK for the purpose of this example. This can be done with the vxedit command using the rename operand. We also see the new disk (sdc) under VxVM control. It has been initialized but not yet assigned to any disk group.