LVM disks from different host to be used on VXVM?

[Doug O'Leary]

Hey;

Interesting situation. I had three disks remapped to a host from a different one. On their original host, they were part of a clustered LVM volume group; on the new one they're to be used under vxvm.

I tried the pvremove and got the error about these disks being part of an exported volume group.

I then created a temp vg and imported the disks with the intent of using vgremove. That choked too because the vg wasn't active (strange that one). I couldn't activate it because I didn't have all the disks only three of the original 9.

I finally got tired of wrestling with it and did a simple loop of:

dd if=/stand/vmunix of=/dev/rdsk/${pv}

once that was done, vxdctl enable and the disks are usable afer

vxdisk list | grep 'online invalid' | grep c4t[78] | awk '{print $1}' | \
while read pv
do
/usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxdisksetup -i ${pv} privlen=20480
done

Is there a *right* way to get these disks out from under LVM? Obviously anything that works is right; however, blasting the LVM structures with a dd seems like pretty serious overkill.

Thanks.

Doug O'Leary

[Robert-Jan Goossens · Accepted solution]

Doug,

I believe you have found the supported solution to remove the LVM disk headers.

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/317631.htm

If you would like to reuse a VXVM disk under LVM control you would have use the "pvcreate -f" command to force the creation of the LVM disk header. VXVM does not have an equivalent command.

Regards,
Robert-Jan

[Doug O'Leary]

Hey;

>>If you would like to reuse a VXVM disk under LVM control you would have use the "pvcreate -f" command to force the creation of the LVM disk header. VXVM does not have an equivalent command.

Actually, there is: /usr/lib/vxvm/bin/vxdiskunsetup. I've had the pleasure of trying that out a time or two as well.

Thanks for the link.

Doug O'Leary