Veritas Volume Manager 5.1 SP1 Administrator"s Guide (5900-1506, April 2011)
A disk’s type identifies how VxVM accesses a disk, and how it manages the disk’s
private and public regions.
The following disk access types are used by VxVM:
When the vxconfigd daemon is started, VxVM obtains a list of known
disk device addresses from the operating system and configures disk
access records for them automatically.
auto
There is no private region (only a public region for allocating subdisks).
This is the simplest disk type consisting only of space for allocating
subdisks. Such disks are most useful for defining special devices (such
as RAM disks, if supported) on which private region data would not
persist between reboots. They can also be used to encapsulate disks
where there is insufficient room for a private region. The disks cannot
store configuration and log copies, and they do not support the use
of the vxdisk addregion command to define reserved regions.
VxVM cannot track the movement of nopriv disks on a SCSI chain
or between controllers.
nopriv
The public and private regions are on the same disk area (with the
public area following the private area).
simple
Auto-configured disks (with disk access type auto) support the following disk
formats:
The disk is formatted as a Cross-platform Data Sharing (CDS) disk
that is suitable for moving between different operating systems. This
is the default format for disks that are not used to boot the system.
Typically, most disks on a system are configured as this disk type.
However, it is not a suitable format for boot, root or swap disks, or for
mirrors or hot-relocation spares of such disks.
cdsdisk
The disk is formatted as a simple disk. This format can be applied to
disks that are used to boot the system. The disk can be converted to
a CDS disk if it was not initialized for use as a boot disk.
hpdisk
The vxcdsconvert utility can be used to convert disks to the cdsdisk format.
See the vxcdsconvert(1M) manual page.
Warning: If a disk is initialized by VxVM as a CDS disk, the CDS header occupies
the portion of the disk where the partition table would usually be located. If you
subsequently use a command such as fdisk to create a partition table on a CDS
disk, it erases the CDS information and could cause data corruption.
Administering disks
Disk devices
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