Creating logical volume storage pools on a Virtual I/O Server

You can create a logical volume storage pool on a Virtual I/O Server using the Hardware Management Console or the mksp and mkbdsp commands.

Before you start, ensure that the Virtual I/O Server is at version 1.5 or later. To update the Virtual I/O Server, see Updating the Virtual I/O Server.
Tip: If you are using the HMC, version 7 release 3.4.2 or later, you can use the HMC graphical interface to create logical volume storage pools on the Virtual I/O Server.

Logical volume storage pools are volume groups, which are collections of one or more physical volumes. The physical volumes that comprise a logical volume storage pool can be of varying sizes and types.

To create a logical volume storage pool, complete the following steps from the Virtual I/O Server command-line interface:

  1. Create a logical volume storage pool by running the mksp command:
    mksp -f dev_clients hdisk2 hdisk4
    In this example, the name of the storage pool is dev_clients and it contains hdisk2 and hdisk4.
  2. Define a logical volume, which will be visible as a disk to the client logical partition. The size of this logical volume will act as the size of disks that will be available to the client logical partition. Use the mkbdsp command to create a 11 GB logical volume called dev_dbsrv as follows:
    mkbdsp -sp dev_clients 11G -bd dev_dbsrv
    If you also want to create a virtual target device, which maps the virtual SCSI server adapter to the logical volume, add -vadapter vhostx to the end of the command. For example:
    mkbdsp -sp dev_clients 11G -bd dev_dbsrv -vadapter vhost4