File Too Large

[Ken McCue]

I have assigned a 200gb LUN to our HP-UX 11.0 system via HBA from a EMC Clarion. When I try to create a Volume Group with this disk it errors out with the error " File too large". Is there a size limit on vg's?

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Kenneth:

The "file to large" error refers to the fact the the LVM structures created during 'vgcreate' do not fit into one physical disk extent. You can increase the 'pe_size' and/or reduce the 'max_pe', 'max_pv', and 'max_lv' to gain a smaller geometry which will then fit one physical extent.

For the maximum supported file and filesystem sizes, see here:

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/5971-2383/5971-2383.html

Regards!

...JRF...

[Ken McCue]

Thanks for the assist!! I' ll try it now.

Ken

[John Meissner]

make your PE size larger when creating the volume group. I encountered this a few weeks ago... I tried to use PE size of 8 but needed to make it 16 in order for it to work.

Basically all the disk information for the entire volume group must fit within one PE which is the header so to speak for the volume group. if the with a PE size of 8 I belive the largest I could make the number of physical extents was 146 (I believe) to get to the full 255 you'll need to increase you PE size to 16.

[Michael Steele_2]

'File too Large' is a 'vgcreate' error and means the LVM header can't fit into one PE. Refer to '-e' - MAX_PE and '-s' - PE_SIZE when using 'vgcreate' to make adjustments. The default PE size is 4 MB while the default 'MAX_PE' is 1016 PE's. So if a PE is 4 MB then that's 1016 times 4 MB to size the disk, or ~ 4 GB. 'MAX_PE' is the first 'vgcreate' argument to adjust and will adjust up to 65535 PEs. Here's an example:

vgcreate -e 36000 -s 128 /dev/vg## /dev/dsk/cXtYdZ

Note, 'PE_SIZE' must be a power of 2. (* 1,2,4,8,16, etc. *)

[Mark Greene_1]

Kenneth,

You are also going to want to run "pvchange -t 180" for each /dev/dsk/c*t*d* device to change the timeout value. HP has a problem with false timeouts from the fibre, as the default is only 30 seconds.

HTH
mark