move VG from HPUX to Linux

[vijay alur alur]

Hello All,

Is it possible to move a VG on a HPUX OS to a Linux OS?

The scenario is, there are 2 server, one is HPUX 11.31 and another one is red hat linux. connected to SAN.

I want the linux OS access the VG from HPUX by allocating the disk to linux.

Is it possible to vgexport at HPUX, give the visibliity of the disks from SAN to linux and vgimport on linux to access the data?

Regards,

[Dennis Handly]

I seriously doubt you can do this.  Do you have vxfs on Linux?

And is it using the same LVM?

[vijay alur alur]

It's ext4 on Linux and Linux uses lvm2 while hpux has lvm1.....

[Matti_Kurkela]

Linux LVM is definitely *not* the same as HP-UX LVM, although the commands and many operational concepts are very much similar. The on-disk data structures are completely different and not compatible.

If you have VxVM on HP-UX, and then purchase VxVM + VxFS for Linux from Symantec, then it is apparently possible to use Linux to access a VxVM volume group that was created on HP-UX.

The standard Linux kernel includes the FreeVxFS driver, which can access VxFS filesystems, but it has some severe limitations:

• it can access VxFS layout versions 2, 3 and 4 only. I think the default VxFS layout version in HP-UX 11.31 is something like 6 or 7 now.
• it is read-only, so it might be useful for one-way transfer of files from HP-UX to Linux, but not much else.

RedHat does not seem to include the FreeVxFS driver at all among the standard kernel modules. You can of course compile it yourself, but it won't be officially supported. I don't think I've seen the FreeVxFS driver available in (let alone supported by) any "server-grade" Linux distribution.

The VxVM + VxFS commercial product from Symantec is known as Veritas Storage Foundation:

http://www.symantec.com/storage-foundation