Mounting HPUX vxfs filesystem on Redhat Linux

[Unix Team_6]

Hi all,

anyone either doing, or know how to, mount an hpux vxfs filesystem onto a Redhat linux box ?

We want to use timefinder on our DMX array on some hpux servers to split a copy for backup then mount it on a Redhat linux Netbackup media server then read it from there and write it direct to tape.

Its about 10TB so we dont want to copy it over the network from the hpux servers to the Redhat media server as we would normally do.

Do you need to load some sort of vxfs rpm onto redhat to it can recognise hpux vxfs filesystems ?

Cheers,

Stefan

[Luk Vandenbussche]

Check this link.

http://martin.hinner.info/fs/vxfs/

But be careful, test is on a scratch fs first

[Ralph Grothe]

This seems a bit dated.
Last time I compiled the latest stable Linux kernel I noticed while flipping through the filesystem section in make menuconfig that the current kernel offers VxFS support, albeit read-only.
There's even some footage in the Filesystems Howto

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO-9.html#vxfs

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Advice:
1) Make sure you use read only access on the vxfs filesystem to limit the chances of corruption of the host filesystem.

2) 10 TB through a GB connection is not that bad.

SEP

[Unix Team_6]

Thanks all.

I can see we can use this on the Redhat box;

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/products/sysreq.jsp?pcid=2245&pvid=203_1

The question is if we use this Veritas foundation on Redhat can it mount an HPUX vxfs filesystem or do we have to replace all our hpux filesystems with VxVM too (ie load veritas foundation on hpux as well). Someone tells me the metadata structure on HPUX vxfs is different to veritas foundation filesystems so theyre incompatible.

[Armin Kunaschik]

It depends on the disk layout...
Is the filesystem on LVM or VxVM on the HP-UX box?

I doubt that Linux will recognize the LVM disk layout of HP-UX.
If the filesystem is on VxVM and you added the disks as CDS disk it's possible to import the disk on Linux (according to Veritas, I never tried).
You need to buy a license of Veritas Volume Manager (including VXFS) for the Linux box.

While getting the license and preparing and testing the hosts, from my point of view it's faster to copy things over the network :-)

My 2 cents,
Armin

[Rick Beldin]

I played around with this about a year ago with RHEL4 on an Itanium dual-boot box and was unsuccessful. I think one of the authors is correct - the HP-UX LVM piece is what is not understood.