VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide

Creating Application Volumes

Volumes created by VERITAS Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP) are similar to traditional

volumes created by vxassist, but have the advantage that their intent is preserved and cannot

accidentally be degraded. Volumes that are created by ISP can be managed by using commands

such as vxvoladm, or by using the VEA client graphical user interface. For information on using

VEA to create volumes, refer to the VEA online help. This chapter describes how to use the

vxvoladm command to create volumes.

Note To create application volumes successfully, the appropriate licenses must be present on your

system. For example, you need a full VERITAS Volume Manager license and a VERITAS

FlashSnap

or FastResync license to use the instant snapshot feature. Vendors of disk arrays

may also provide capabilities that require special licenses for certain features of their

hardware.

Overview of the vxvoladm Command

You can use the vxvoladm command to create and manage volumes. ISP optimally assigns

storage resources as defined and constrained by any parameter values, rules, capabilities and

templates that you specify as arguments to the command. Capabilities provide the highest, most

abstract way of specifying volumes. Rules provide the lowest, most direct means of specification.

This gives you great freedom to create volumes that meet your requirements.

The vxvoladm command takes the general form:

# vxvoladm [options] keyword volume [additional_arguments] \

[storage_specification] [attribute=value ...]

The keyword denotes the action that vxvoladm is to perform on the named volume. The storage

specification defines the storage that can or cannot be used with an operation. This consists of a

comma-separated list of disk media names and other storage attributes, such as

Controller:controller_name to indicate all disks on a controller. Excluded storage is

indicated by a ! prefix. Finally, attributes and their values can be used to specify further constraints

on the operation.