SUMMARY - Veritas on Solaris

From: Venkat Ramachandran (vramachandran@zip.sbi.com)
Date: Thu Apr 01 1999 - 09:20:19 CST


My original question was....
>
> Dear sun/solaris Admins,
>
> When do we use fsgen and gen options with vxassist command
> in veritas on solaris , for creating volumes.
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Venkat
>
> email <venkat.ramachandran@ssmb.com>

I sincerely thank all of you who have responded to my question
sooner than expected.

Peter L. Wargo <plw@ncgr.org>
Keith.Willenson@sunny.health.state.mn.us
John Nguyen <jnguyen@inm.eds.com>
rogerk@veritas.com
David Massey <dmassey@e-one.com>
Jonathan.Loh@BankAmerica.com

In general everyone responded with the following answer.

You may want to think of it this way gen = raw, fsgen = mkfs'd. In other
words fsgen is a partition prepared to put a filesystem on. gen is not.
when you want to use raw devices for RDBMS then use gen for creating the
volumes.Otherwise use fsgen for creating filesystems on top of the volumes.

My special thanks to the following people
for their extra info.

From: rajesha@mcm.com
From: bkrishna@telcordia.com

From: rajesha@mcm.com

fsgen and gen are usage type . If u want to crate a file system in the
volume then use "fsgen" ,If u like to create a raw device in volume
(generally used by Database) then use "gen" . One more thing If u want
to create a Riad 5 type of configuration then u have to specify only
"raid5" (fsgen or gen is not reqd. in this case).

From: bkrishna@telcordia.com

SYNOPSIS: How to change an 'fsgen' volume to a 'gen' volume (or visa-versa)

DETAIL DESCRIPTION:

How to change an 'fsgen' volume to a 'gen' volume (or visa-versa)

SOLUTION SUMMARY:

 1. Backup all your data in case something goes wrong.

 2. Stop all activity on the volume. If it's mounted, unmount it. If it's
    a raw database volume, stop the database.

 3. Stop the volume:
 In the GUI, click on the volume and pick
                AdvancedOps->Volume->StopVolumes->Stop

        CommandLine:
                vxvol -g <dgname> stop <volname>

 4. Disassociate ALL but ONE data plex from the volume. This means if
    the volume has any log plexes or mirrors, dissassociate them,
    leaving you with only ONE single plex that contains the data.

        In the GUI, click on the plex(es) to disassociate and pick
                AdvancedOps->Plex->DissassociatePlexes

        CommandLine:
                vxplex -g <dgname> dis <plexname>...

 6. Save the volume's configuration to a temporary file:

        vxprint -g <dgname> -vm <volname> >
/var/tmp/VOLINFO

 5. Edit that file, change "fsgen" to "gen" (or "gen"
to "fsgen", depending
    on what you are doing).

 7. Disassociate the final data plex from the volume. See step 4 above for
    the ways to disassociate a plex from a volume.

 8. Remove the volume:

        In the GUI, click on the volume and pick
                AdvancedOps->Volume->RemoveVolumes

        CommandLine:
                vxedit -g <dgname> rm <volname>

 9. Recreate the volume using the command:

        vxmake -g <dgname> -d /var/tmp/VOLINFO

10. Start the volume:

        In the GUI, click on the volume and pick
                AdvancedOps->Volume->StartVolumes->Start

        CommandLine:
                vxvol -g <dgname> start <volname>

11. At this point, you should be able to mount the filesystem or start your
    database.

12. For each plex which you disassociated in the steps above, associate it
    back to the volume. Do them one at a time.

        In the GUI, click on the volume and a plex and pick
                AdvancedOps->Plex->AssociatePlex
        CommandLine:
                 vxplex -g <dgname> att <volname>
<plexname>

    This will re-sync the data to the mirrors.

Wth Thanks and regards
Venkat <venkat.ramachandran@ssmb.com>



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