Veritas Volume Manager 5.0.1 Administrator's Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, November 2009

not leave intermediate states that you have to clean up. If vxassist finds an
error or an exceptional condition, it exits after leaving the system in the same
state as it was prior to the attempted operation.
The vxassist utility helps you perform the following tasks:
■ Creating volumes.
■ Creating mirrors for existing volumes.
■ Growing or shrinking existing volumes.
■ Backing up volumes online.
■ Reconfiguring a volume’s layout online.
vxassist obtains most of the information it needs from sources other than your
input. vxassist obtains information about the existing objects and their layouts
from the objects themselves.
For tasks requiring new disk space, vxassist seeks out available disk space and
allocates it in the configuration that conforms to the layout specifications and
that offers the best use of free space.
The vxassist command takes this form:
# vxassist [options] keyword volume [attributes...]
where keyword selects the task to perform. The first argument after a vxassist
keyword, volume, is a volume name, which is followed by a set of desired volume
attributes. For example, the keyword make allows you to create a new volume:
# vxassist [options] make volume length [attributes]
The length of the volume can be specified in sectors, kilobytes, megabytes,
gigabytes or terabytes by using a suffix character of s, k, m, g, or t. If no suffix is
specified, the size is assumed to be in sectors.
See the vxintro(1M) manual page.
Additional attributes can be specified as appropriate, depending on the
characteristics that you wish the volume to have. Examples are stripe unit width,
number of columns in a RAID-5 or stripe volume, number of mirrors, number of
logs, and log type.
By default, the vxassist command creates volumes in a default disk group
according to a set of rules.
See “Rules for determining the default disk group” on page 196.
To use a different disk group, specify the -g diskgroup option to vxassist.
279Creating volumes
Using vxassist