Help with moving volume groups

[bgfarmer]

Please forgive me, but I am not an AIX admin, even though my managers have given me a title. OH, for a little training.

Anyway. Here is my situation and questions. We have added some scsi drives to our system. Management wants to move one of our volume groups, appsvg, to one of these disks so the ssa drives currently installed can be used to access data faster from our database. Appsvg has just filesystems on it. We also have a few filesystems on another volume group, infxvg, that will need to be moved also.

Question on procedures:

Do I
1. Drop appsvg and create the volume group on the new disks, and restore using restorevg, that volume group?

2. Do I then drop the lv's for the filesystems (mount points) on the other volume group, infxvg, and recreate them in the "new" appsvg on the slower drives and restore using file system restore, those file systems that need to be restored?

3. Is it better to create a new volume group for the things coming off of infxvg? Call it something like apps2vg?

4. Is any of this making any sense to anyone here?

5. Is there anywhere out there that shows procedures on any of this? If so, could you let me in on it?

I would really appreciate any help. I am not going to be able to do this on a test box for practice and am really afraid to attempt this on production. Any comments would help!!!


TIA
BF

 

[MoshiachNow]

Hi,

You can refer to

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docvie...lume&uid=aix1d46890fdf1a90adc852568160069ff5f

"Long live king Moshiach !"

http://www.7for70.com/

 

[sectorseveng]

For the filesystems you have in infxvg you should use the procedure that levw has pointed to because filesystems cannot be moved between VGs without outage.

However, before doing that you may be able to migrate appsvg from SSA to scsi disks without an outage. This is dependant on a couple of things:
1) If appsvg has not reached it's full allocation of disks - see with 'lsvg appsvg', assuming this is a standard VG if the number of PVs (disks) within that VG is less than 32 you can add more disks.
2) If the scsi disks are about the same size as the SSA disks so that the physical partition size (PP size) does not require changing.

If these 2 conditions are met then you can:
1) add the scsi disks to the appsvg (use the fastpath 'smitty extendvg' to add more disks)
2) move the logical volumes from SSA to scsi disks (use the fastpath 'smitty migratepv')
3) remove the SSA disks from appsvg (use the fastpath 'smitty reducevg).

By the way, if you are just starting with AIX always remember "smitty is your friend".

 

[bgfarmer]

I really appreciate all of the good info you have given.

One thing I want to point out is that the ssa drives are 9gig and the scsi drives are 18gig so I am not sure I can do as the second post suggests. Here is what I was thinking of though:

1. Create a new volume group, apps2vg on the scsi drives and then move the file systems in appsvg into the new volume group as suggested in reply one.

Then I could move the other file systems in infxvg as above and blow away the appsvg and reuse as needed.

Does this sound feasable?

Smitty WILL be my best friend SOON!

 

[MoshiachNow]

It is feasable,indeed. "Long live king Moshiach !"

http://www.7for70.com/