AIX Importing and Exporting Storage

Importing and Exporting Storage

In an environment where there is a storage administrator and a systems administrator, there are some best practices and procedures for importing and exporting disks between hosts. Each administrator has some distinct responsibilities.

AIX Administrator

Releasing a volume and volume group

Unmount the filesystem.
Vary off the volumegroup.
Export the volumegroup.
rmdev the associated vpath or dlmfdrv's.
rmdev the associated hdisks.

Removing 1 hdisk from a volume group

reducevg hdiskN.
rmdev the associated vpath or dlmfdrv's
rmdev the associated hdisks.

Receiving a new volume

run cfgmgr.
Verify that newly imported hdisks do not have a conflicting PVID.

Storage Administrator

Re-allocated storage should be re-formatted on the subsystem before releasing to systems administrators. This ensures that confidential data does not flow from one group to another, and prevents PVID conflicts.
Extra care must be taken when re-allocating ShadowImage volumes. There is the potential for PVID conflicts because the copy has the same PVID as the source.