One of the cool features of Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) is it’s ability to change the layout of a volume on the fly with vxasssist(1m). This option has helped me numerous times, especially when I needed to mirror volumes that weren’t mirrored. Given the following unmirrored striped volume: $ vxprint -hft Disk group: oradg DG [...]
One of the cool and often overlooked features in Veritas Volume Manager is the failure notification mechanism. This facility provides automated notifications when problems are detected with Veritas managed disks, plexes, subdisks and volumes. These notifications are active by default, and will generate an e-mail to the user root each time a failure is detected. [...]
When a disk fails that is part of a redundant volume (e.g., RAID 1, RAID 5), the volume is able to continue handling I/O requests, but becomes susceptible to data loss if additional devices fail ( and in the case of RAID5 volumes, the volume will operate in a degraded state, since parity calculations are [...]
When Veritas loses contact (e.g., if a fiber cable is removed between a server and a storage array) with an active device, Veritas will place the device in the failed state, which will be reported as “failed was: cXtXdX” in the vxdisk(1m) output: $ vxdisk list DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS c0t0d0s2 auto:none – - [...]
When utilizing Veritas’s DMP utilities, a controller, enclosure or DMP nodename is required when performing most actions. To list the controllers on a server, the vxdmpadm(1m) utility can be invoked with the “listctlr” option: $ vxdmpadm listctlr all CTLR-NAME ENCLR-TYPE STATE ENCLR-NAME ===================================================== c3 EMC ENABLED EMC0 c2 EMC ENABLED EMC0 c0 Disk ENABLED Disk [...]
While poking around /var/adm/vx this week, I noticed that VxVM (Veritas Volume Manager) 4.x logs all commands that have been executed to /var/adm/vx/cmdlog: $ tail -6 /var/adm/vx/cmdlog # 7601, 24143, Mon Sep 12 09:21:04 2005 /usr/sbin/vxdg list -o alldgs # 32045, 24257, Mon Sep 12 09:21:47 2005 /usr/sbin/vxdisk -o alldgs list # 13637, 24444, Mon [...]
