Initializing and Starting a Volume

A volume must be initialized if it was created by the vxmake command and has not yet been initialized, or if the volume has been set to an uninitialized state.

	NOTE: If you create a volume using the vxassist command, vxassist initializes and starts the volume automatically unless you specify the attribute init=none.

To initialize and start a volume, use the following command:

# vxvol start volume

When creating a volume, you can make it immediately available for use by specifying the -b option to the vxassist command, as shown here:

# vxassist -b make volume length layout=mirror

The -b option makes VxVM carry out any required initialization as a background task. It also greatly speeds up the creation of striped volumes by initializing the columns in parallel.

As an alternative to the -b option, you can specify the init=active attribute to make a new volume immediately available for use. In this example, init=active is specified to prevent VxVM from synchronizing the empty data plexes of a new mirrored volume:

# vxassist make volume length layout=mirror init=active

	CAUTION: There is a very small risk of errors occurring when the init=active attribute is used. Although written blocks are guaranteed to be consistent, read errors can arise in the unlikely event that fsck attempts to verify uninitialized space in the file system, or if a file remains unitialized following a system crash. If in doubt, use the -b option to vxassist instead.

The following command can be used to enable a volume without initializing it:

# vxvol init enable volume

This allows you to restore data on the volume from a backup before using the following command to make the volume fully active:

# vxvol init active volume

If you want to zero out the contents of an entire volume, use this command to initialize it:

# vxvol init zero volume

This command writes zeroes to the entire length of the volume and to any log plexes. It then makes the volume active. You can also zero out a volume by specifying the attribute init=zero to vxassist, as shown in this example:

# vxassist make volume length layout=raid5 init=zero

	NOTE: You cannot use the -b option to make this operation a background task.