Veritas Volume Manage 3.5 total confusion!

[Craig A. Sharp]

I have a new 7420 with two 2405 disk trays that are each dual pathed. I need to do the following with Veritas 3.5 and I am totally lost.
The boot volume (vg00) is on the internal server disks and will remain lvm.

1. Create a disk group with two of the disks. One from each tray.
2. Have both paths active to each disk.
3. Create the filesytems on the disks.
4. Mirror the disks.

The Veritas administration guide is very hard to understand. I am very fulent in LVM.

Can someone help me with instructions to carry out my task.

Thanks!

[IT_2007]

Few things. Without knowing much Veritas Volume Manager it would be very hard to manage disks.

1. You want LVM for vg00.. correct?
2. VxVM 3.5 for other volume groups other than vg00. Install VxVM 3.5 base foundation suite with license on the server.
3. Make sure that what naming standrad for vg's and logical volumes going to be for VxVM and then you can use following steps to create and assign disks.
use gUI which would be easier for you add disks, create vg's and logical volumes.

/opt/VRTSob/bin/vea &

[Craig A. Sharp]

I will give it a try and let you know! Thank you

[Craig A. Sharp]

I see no place in vea to work on disk administration....

[Craig A. Sharp]

In answer to the questions, yes vg00 is lvm and will stay that way.

I tried vea but even though I see my server and "disks" and "enclosures", etc, I see no way of managing the disks.

[Alzhy · Accepted solution]

Hi Craig,

VEA is Explorer style and should be intuitive. But if you do not know the basics - I believe you'll get no further. It has been my experience that VxVM persons adapt quickly with LVM/other VMs in case of the other way around...

At any rate, if the GUI is not much of help to you - try the TUI --- vxdiskadm. But to get started - you will need to carve a useless rootdg or just create all of your stuff using the mandatory "diskgroup" rootdg. You can use vxinstall to create rootdg and other diskgroups... You may want to try using the VEA GUI once more once yu've got rootdg carved up...

Hope this helps...

[IT_2007]

sorry, I didn't check your info. What kind of disks are you planning to initialize and creating vg's and logical vol's etc.. Give your information so that I can give you steps command line to add them.

[IT_2007]

Here is examples to create a VG:

1. ioscan -fn
2. insf -e
3. vxdctl enable --> this may take a while.
4. vxdg list --> should show you disks "error" means uninitialized by VxVM.
"online" means already initialized.
"LVM" using by LVM
5. vxdisksetup -i /dev/rdsk/cxtydz
will initialize disk
run same command to initialize disks.
6. you can use vea gui once you initialize disks.

[Bill Rothanburg]

You should run vxinstall (or is it vxsetup? It's been a while..) and it will walk you through the initial setup with the rootdg.

After that you can use vxdiskadm or vea to do the rest of your work.

[Craig A. Sharp]

Got it...I used a combination of vxassist and vea. I ended up calling Veritas support as the disks are multipathed...this was causing all kinds of issues until I figured out that I needed to mask the secondary paths. Once this was done, all started working correctly!

[Mark Fisher_4]

Well, I'm working on my first experience with Veritas clustered file systems and having similar problems. You stated that your drives were multi-pathed and that caused problems. I'm thinking I have the same problem since I have EMC Powerpath installed.

If i use vxdiskadm and look at a disk I see the following:

Device to list in detail [

,none,q,?] (default: none) EMC_CLARiiON0_2

Device: EMC_CLARiiON0_2
devicetag: EMC_CLARiiON0_2
type: auto
flags: online error private autoconfig
errno: Device path not valid
Multipathing information:
numpaths: 4
c8t0d3 state=enabled
c10t0d3 state=NoLicense
c6t0d3 state=NoLicense
c4t0d3 state=NoLicense

This does not look good to me!!!

I used the suggested script from the CFS document to create the VXFS disk and ran into these errors:

+ /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup c8t0d3
VxVM vxdisksetup ERROR V-5-2-43 c8t0d3: Invalid disk device for vxdisksetup
+ vxdisk online c8t0d3
VxVM vxdisk ERROR V-5-1-537 Device c8t0d3: Not in the configuration
+ vxdisk -f init c8t0d3
VxVM vxdisk ERROR V-5-1-3421 Device c8t0d3 is already in use by LVM.


Any idea what you did to resolve the multi-pathing related problem?

[IT_2007]

If you have EMC powerpath installed then you better suppress multipaths using vxdiskadm command and select option 17 and then 1 and give controller no's. Keep one to have one path.

The above step to be done before you create volume groups other wise your info will be lost.

reboot your system to keep it persistent.

[Alzhy]

If you have PowerPath installed (which I am not sure you can do away with) --- then read very carefully doumentation from EMC or Symantec (Veritas) about what needs to be done..

THe previous poster I think mentions one -- that is explicit/forced suppression of paths so VxVM only sees one path...

[Mark Fisher_4]

These path 2 notes have been extrememly helpfull and I appreciate it. If you know of any specific documemtation for setting up CFS using EMC disks and Powerpath, that would be great.

I was able to disable the multi-pathing and the disks are "online".

When I startup the cluster and the CFS package, both servers in the cluster crash. I think it is because I have a problem with "enclosure based names for disks". I want to CFS 2 SAN disks called:

root@omzatl05:/vxdisk list
DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

EMC_CLARiiON0_1 auto:none - - online invalid
EMC_CLARiiON0_2 auto:none - - online invalid


The problem is these "enclosures" are pointing to different SAN disks.

On server omzatl05 the enclosure EMC_CLARiiON0_1 points to c8t0d3 and this is SAN LUN 222.

But on server omzatl06 the enclosure EMC_CLARiiON0_1 points to c5t0d3 which is SAN LUN 508.

So these "enclosures" need to point to the same SAN disk? I would expect they should.

So is there a way to create an "emclosure" and select the spcific c#t#d# to use? All my enclosures where built automatically when I ran the vxinstall command.

Thanks once again for everyones help. I did not know this would be so difficult.

[IT_2007]

fisher,

yes you can do. don't have handy documentation. If you search from veritas support docs then you would get how to create enclosure for Clariion disks. I think you have to install some library files to see Clariion based enclosures.

[IT_2007]

fisher,

check this link

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1025124&admit=-682735245+1157135617690+28353475

[Mark Fisher_4]

This is VXVM V4.1 so I used the method described in vxdiskadm to disable the multi-pathing. My problem was each enclosure is pointing to a different SAN disk on each server. I might have found a problem with the SAN storage group config.

EMC uses a HLU/ALU numbering pair to present the disks. The ALU is the "LUN number" and the HLU is the unix drive number ( the d# value in the special file c#t#d#). The HLU/ALU pairs on the 2 servers do not match and this explains the mismatch I saw in my previous message.

I have asked our SAN folks to correct this and I'll see if this helps.

I still cannot find any docs that describe how to build a new "enclosure" and add a specific disk to it. Any ideas?

Thanks once again for the help...

[Mark Fisher_4]

Once we got the ALU/HLU numbers corrected on the SAN we could build the CFS. Thanks everyone for the help. Let me figure out how to assign points.