When mirrors and RAID5 devices are created with Veritas Volume Manager, the volume contents need to be synchronized to an initial consistent state (e.g., parity and mirrors need to be synchronized). Veritas assigns a unique task id to each operation, and allows tasks to be monitored and displayed with the vxtask(1m) utility:
$ vxtask list
TASKID PTID TYPE/STATE PCT PROGRESS
172 ATCOPY/R 05.57% 0/209698816/11689984 PLXATT oravol04 oravol04-02 oradg
Since synchronization can be extremely I/O intensive, you might want to pause a synchronization task until a later time. This is easily accomplished by passing the task id to vxtask(1m)‘s pause option:
$ vxtask pause 172
$ vxtask list
TASKID PTID TYPE/STATE PCT PROGRESS
172 ATCOPY/P 05.76% 0/209698816/12077056 PLXATT oravol04 oravol04-02 oradg
Once you are ready to resume the task, you can use vxtask(1m)‘s resume option:
$ vxtask resume 172
$ vxtask list
TASKID PTID TYPE/STATE PCT PROGRESS
172 ATCOPY/R 06.02% 0/209698816/12613632 PLXATT oravol04 oravol04-02 oradg
This is super useful, and it looks to have caught on.