Physical volumes can be exported to client partitions as virtual SCSI disks. The Virtual I/O Server is capable of taking a pool of heterogeneous physical disk storage attached to its back end and exporting this as homogeneous storage in the form of SCSI disk LUNs.
The Virtual I/O Server must be able to accurately identify a physical volume each time it boots, even if an event such as a storage area network (SAN) reconfiguration or adapter change has taken place. Physical volume attributes, such as the name, address, and location, might change after the system reboots due to SAN reconfiguration. However, the Virtual I/O Server must be able to recognize that this is the same device and update the virtual device mappings. For this reason, in order to export a physical volume as a virtual device, the physical volume must have either a unique identifier (UDID), a physical identifier (PVID), or an IEEE volume attribute.
For instructions on how to determine whether your disks have one of these identifiers, see Identifying exportable disks.
The following commands are used to manage physical volumes.
| Physical volume command | Description |
|---|---|
| lspv | Displays information about a physical volume within a volume group. |
| migratepv | Moves allocated physical partitions from one physical volume to one or more other physical volumes. |