single disk 2 volumes groups ?

[Rob Yohn]

I have an Itanium 11.23 box. Is it possible to partition a single disk so that I can put 2 volume groups on it? The disk is HP 73.4GMAX3073NC.

[Patrick Wallek]

Why do you need 2 VG's on a single disk?

Why not do a single VG with multiple LV's in that VG? IMHO that would be easier to manage and make a lot more sense.

[Rob Yohn]

It's for testing.

We have a production server that has multiple disks and multiple vgs as well as lvs on it. I'm trying to duplicate the layout on this test server so I can get all the steps in order for adding larger drives to the production server. The test server only has 2 73GB drives in it.

[Robert-Jan Goossens · Accepted solution]

Hi,

No not possible, a disk can only be part of one volume group.

Regards,
Robert-Jan

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

As stated, no.

> I'm trying to duplicate the layout on this test server so I can get all the steps in order for adding larger drives to the production server.

Well, disk is cheap to purchase. That aside, the steps for creating volume groups, logical volumes and filesystems are very straightforward. If you want documentation, see:

http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-90950/ch06.html

Regards!

...JRF...

[Rob Yohn]

Thank you everyone for the information. Points awarded.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Noteworthy is this is not a problem for LVM Linux. The fact that LVM works differently in this respect often causes confusion.

Glad your issue is resolved.

SEP

[Torsten.]

With 11.23 you have the "idisk" utility to create partitions on a disk.

While mirroring the root disk, you work with partitions and extend the vg with a partition

(vgextend ... cxtydzs2 - note "s2"!)

So I could imagine you can create 2 partitions and handle each of them just like a disk - well, this is for testing ;-)

If you try this, come back with your results ...

[Rob Yohn]

I have been able to partition the drive into 2 HPUX partitions, but I am unable to get pvcreate not to recognize the entire disk. If I use pvcreate on /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2 and then pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s3, it tells me the physical volume already belongs to a volume group.

disk 1 0/1/1/0.0.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE HP 73.4GMAX3073NC
/dev/dsk/c2t0d0 /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s3 /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s1 /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s4
/dev/dsk/c2t0d0s1 /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s4 /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2
/dev/dsk/c2t0d0s2 /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0 /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s3

[Torsten.]

You say 2 partitions, but you have device files for 4 partitions - step 1 is trial, step 2 is error ... currently on step 2, because of too many steps 1?