VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Migration Guide (August 2002)

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Converting LVM to VxVM

This chapter explains how to convert your LVM conﬁguration to a VxVM conﬁguration

and presents the following main topics:

◆ Converting Unused LVM Physical Volumes to VxVM Disks

◆ Converting LVM Volume Groups to VxVM Disk Groups

◆ Restoring the LVM Volume Group Conﬁguration

◆ Examples

The basic tools for conversion are the VxVM commands, vxvmconvert and

vxdiskadm, and the LVM administrative utilities such as pvremove and

vgcfgbackup. The discussionheredetails how to usethese tools and givessome insights

into how these tools work.

The disks on your system managed by LVM can be of two types: LVM disks in volume

groups, and unused disks.

The former are disks that contain logical volumes and volume groups. Unused disks

contain no user data, and are not used by any volume group, but have LVM disk headers

written by pvcreate. Conversion is done differently for these two types of disks.

For unused LVM disks you can use a combination of pvremove and vxdiskadm. For

LVM disks in volume groups, the primary tool for conversion is the vxvmconvert

command. For information on vxdiskadm, see the man page vxdiskadm(1M) or the

VERITAS Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide.

Converting Unused LVM Physical Volumes to VxVM Disks

LVM disks which are not part of any volume group, and contain no user data, are simply

cleaned up, so that thereare no LVM diskheaders. Thenthe disks aregiven overto VxVM

through the normal means of initializing disks.

Caution Exercise caution while using this procedure to give disks over to VxVM. You

must be absolutely certain that the disks are not in use in any LVM

conﬁguration. If there is any user data on these disks, it will be lost during

conversion.