I have used Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and Veritas File system (VxFS) for as long as I can remember. All of my VxVM and VxFS experience has been on Solaris, so I thought I would install both products on a Linux host to see if anything was different. The Linux installation turned out to be nearly identical to the Solaris installation (the Linux installer install RPMs versus SVR4 packages), and the vx* commands are located in the same place in both operating systems. Since I wanted to get my hands dirty and play with VxVM and VxFS on a Linux host, I first ran the vxdisksetup utility to initialize a few devices:
$ /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxdisksetup -i hdc
VxVM vxdisksetup ERROR V-5-2-1814 hdc: Invalid disk device for 'cdsdisk' format
Gak! After pondering the error for a few minutes, it dawned on me that as of VxVM 4.0 the “cdsdisk” disk format is used by default. The new format allows devices to be transported between different operating systems and hardware architecures (e.g., you can deport a Solaris disk group on a SPARC host (big endian) and import and access it* on an x86 (little endian) Linux host). After sifting through the Veritas support site to see if cdsdisk had any limitations, I came across infodoc 278178. Infodoc 278178 states that the cdsdisk format can only be used on SCSI disks, and showed how to use the vxscsi command to see if the cdsdisk format could be used with a device:
$ /usr/lib/vxvm/diag.d/vxscsi -g sdd
Cannot get disk geometry on /dev/vx/rdmp/hdd !
The IDE disk drives I was using with the Linux host don’t fit into the cdsdisk supportability matrix, so I decided to the use the “sliced” format since the devices were used purely for testing:
$ /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxdisksetup -fi hdc format=sliced
$ /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxdisksetup -fi hdd format=sliced
Once the disks were initialized, I added them to a disk group, carved up a new volume, and created a VxFS file system on the volume:
$ vxdg init datadg hdc hdd cds=off
$ vxassist -g datadg make vol01 512m layout=concat
$ mkfs -t vxfs -o bsize=8192 /dev/vx/dsk/datadg/vol01
version 6 layout
8380416 sectors, 523776 blocks of size 8192, log size 2048 blocks
largefiles supported
I plan to fire up my Sun multipack this weekend to see if the Solaris to Linux migration works as well as the folks at Veritas say (based on past experiences with the Veritas product suite, I am relatively certain it will work well).
To deal with endianness issues, you need to use the fscdsconv utility.