Volume Administration Tasks

subdisk—a region of a physical disk

plex—a series of subdisks linked together in an address space

Disks and disk groups must be initialized and defined to the Volume Manager before volumes can be created. Volumes can be created in either of the following ways:

Automatically—you can create and manipulate volumes by using the vxassist command. The vxassist command creates required plexes and subdisks by using only the basic attributes of the desired volume as input. The vxassist command can also modify existing volumes. It automatically modifies any underlying or associated objects.The vxassist command uses default values for many volume attributes, unless you provide specific values.

Manually—you can create volumes by first creating the volume subdisks, then the plexes, then the volume itself (a bottom-up approach). This approach often requires detailed user input and an understanding of Volume Manager concepts. Creating volumes manually is useful for manipulating volumes with specific, non-default attributes. The manual approach does not use the vxassist command.

create subdisks

create plexes

associate subdisks and plexes

create volumes

associate volumes and plexes

initialize volumes

Before you create volumes, you should determine which volume layout best suits your system needs.