Veritas Volume Manager 5.1 SP1 Administrator"s Guide (5900-1506, April 2011)

Normally, VxVM does not start volumes that are formed entirely from plexes with
volatile subdisks. That is because there is no plex that is guaranteed to contain
the most recent volume contents.
Some RAM disks are used in situations where all volume contents are recreated
after reboot. In these situations, you can force volumes formed from RAM disks
to be started at reboot by using the following command:
# vxvol set startopts=norecov volume
This option can be used only with volumes of type gen.
See the vxvol(1M) manual page.
Veritas Volume Manager co-existence with Oracle
Automatic Storage Management (ASM) disks
ASM disks are the disks used by Oracle Automatic Storage Management software.
Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) co-exists with Oracle ASM disks, by recognizing
the disks as the type Oracle ASM. VxVM protects ASM disks from any operations
that may overwrite the disk. VxVM classifies and displays the ASM disks as ASM
format disks. You cannot initialize an ASM disk, or perform any VxVM operations
that may overwrite the disk.
If the disk is claimed as an ASM disk, disk initialization commands fail with an
appropriate failure message. The vxdisk init command, and the vxdisksetup
command fail, even if the force option is specified. The vxprivutil command
also fails for disks under ASM control, to prevent any on-disk modification of the
ASM device.
If the target disk is under ASM control, any rootability operations that overwrite
the target disk fail. A message indicates that the disk is already in use as an ASM
disk. The rootability operations include operations to create a VM root image
(vxcp_lvmroot command) , create a VM root mirror (vxrootmir command), or
restore the LVM root image (vxres_lvmroot command). The vxdestroy_lvmroot
command also fails for ASM disks, since the target disk is not under LVM control
as expected.
Disks that ASM accessed previously but that no longer belong to an ASM disk
group are called FORMER ASM disks. If you remove an ASM disk from ASM control,
VxVM labels the disk as a FORMER ASM disk. VxVM enforces the same restrictions
for FORMER ASM disks as for ASM disks, to enable ASM to reuse the disk in the
future. To use a FORMER ASM disk with VxVM, you must clean the disk of ASM
information after you remove the disk from ASM control. If a disk initialization
command is issued on a FORMER ASM disk, the command fails. A message
115Administering disks
Veritas Volume Manager co-existence with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) disks