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

■ Foreign devices, such as HP-UX native multi-pathing metanodes, do not have

enclosures, controllers or DMP nodes that can be administered using VxVM

commands. An error message is displayed if you attempt to use the vxddladm

or vxdmpadm commands to administer such devices while HP-UX native

multi-pathing is configured.

■ The I/O Fencing and Cluster File System features are not supported for foreign

devices.

If a suitable ASL is available and installed for an array, these limitations are

removed.

See “Third-party driver coexistence” on page 87.

Disks under VxVM control

When you add a disk to a system that is running VxVM, you need to put the disk

under VxVM control so that VxVM can control the space allocation on the disk.

See “Adding a disk to VxVM” on page 109.

Unless you specify a disk group, VxVM places new disks in a default disk group

according to the rules for determining the default disk group.

See “Rules for determining the default disk group” on page 210.

The method by which you place a disk under VxVM control depends on the

following circumstances:

■ If the disk is new, it must be initialized and placed under VxVM control. You

can use the menu-based vxdiskadm utility to do this.

Warning: Initialization destroys existing data on disks.

■ If the disk is not needed immediately, it can be initialized (but not added to a

disk group) and reserved for future use. To do this, enter none when asked to

name a disk group. Do not confuse this type of “spare disk” with a

hot-relocation spare disk.

■ If the disk was previously initialized for future use by VxVM, it can be

reinitialized and placed under VxVM control.

■ VxVM requires that the disk that is to be placed under VxVM control should

not have any file system created on it. If the disk has any file system on it,

then you need to destroy the file system before placing the disk under VxVM

control.

Administering disks

Disks under VxVM control