The Cuddletech Veritas Volume Manager Series: Volume Kreation: VxMake & Her Seductive Ways
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2. VxMake: Why it's the "Kool" Way

This course directly correlates to its sister course "Volume Kreation: The VxAssist Way". But why two ways? I'll let you read both courses and make up your mind which you prefer, but lets talk about why VxMake is kool. Let me say it now, you don't NEED to use vxmake. VxMake differs from vxassist in that you create objects individually, and you can specify EVERYTHING. VxAssist is nice because you can leave alot of your worries and decisions to Veritas, and not have to worry yourself. While there is a time and place for that, vxmake gives you fine grain control over your volume. In cases that you need a quick 20G volume that is for a small or temporary project, vxassist is nice because you can have your volume ready in minutes. However, if you need 30G+ using striping or mirroring or RAID5 that is critical data you will want to spend more time planning and allocating, in this case vxmake is the way to go.

2.1. Volume Lessons Background

First, let me give you some data on the system I'm using to do these examples. The system is a Sun Ultra2, running Solaris 8 with a single 296Mhz UltraSparcII chip and 512M of RAM. For the disks, I'm using 4 9G FC-AL (SCSI3) disks in a Sun A5100 Fibre Array connected to the system. I'm using Veritas 3.0.2. I'm using UFS for my filesystems. (Note: The SEVM name changed to just "Veritas Volume Manager" after the 2.6 release of SEVM. I am using the "Sun Supplied" version.) Here is some system output you might want: 
# uname -a
SunOS nexus6 5.8 Beta_Refresh sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
# format
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t0d0 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@0,0
       1. c0t1d0 <SUN9.0G cyl 4924 alt 2 hd 27 sec 133>
          /sbus@1f,0/SUNW,fas@e,8800000/sd@1,0
       2. c2t0d0 <SUN9.0G cyl 4924 alt 2 hd 27 sec 133>
          /sbus@1f,0/SUNW,socal@1,0/sf@0,0/ssd@w21000020370e0108,0
       3. c2t1d0 <SUN9.0G cyl 4924 alt 2 hd 27 sec 133>
          /sbus@1f,0/SUNW,socal@1,0/sf@0,0/ssd@w2100002037163333,0
       4. c2t2d0 <SUN9.0G cyl 4924 alt 2 hd 27 sec 133>
          /sbus@1f,0/SUNW,socal@1,0/sf@0,0/ssd@w210000203716d068,0
       5. c2t6d0 <SUN9.0G cyl 4924 alt 2 hd 27 sec 133>
          /sbus@1f,0/SUNW,socal@1,0/sf@0,0/ssd@w2100002037169ef8,0
Specify disk (enter its number): ^D
#
[Notice that c0 is the internals. c2 is the A5100 disks]
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