Originally posted by: Imad77

Hi,

I'm a newbie in AIX 5.3, I have 2 disks in a Pserver and I want to create a RAID 0 (not RAID10 and not mirroring) including 2 disks in a striped volume to gain more space.
Can someone to help me to create this striping volume during the AIX installation or after installation? is it from the smitty tool?

Thanks a lot for your help,

Imad
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Not sure if you are striping LV's or PV's but this is a very good resource for AIX 5.3

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp

I am not sure if you need partner access for this page.
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Originally posted by: nagger

There are lots of way of doing this.

If you have a RAID capable adapter then you can RAID the disks and then install AIX.
This involves booting from the Diag CDROM, setting up the disks and then booting AIX install media.
This is popular for RAID5 but rather useless for striping as there is zero protection.

If you have AIX already running ...
Assuming both disks are in the root volume group (rootvg) use lspv to find out.
First create a logical volume (LV) that includes the 2 disks and using a stripe (you have to decide the stripe width) and then create a filesystem in the previously created LV.

The easiest way is for the LV: smitty lvm take Logical Volume then Add Logical Volume and then you see all the options. Make sure you select both disks in the "Physical Volume names" field and change "stripe Size" (near the bottom) - by hitting TAB (recommended 64K to 256K).

Once created build the filesystem with: smitty jfs2
Take the "Add an Enhanced Journaled File System on a Previously Defined Logical Volume"
Option find the LV you just created.

Once done don't forget to mount the new filesystem with: mount /mynewfs

Hope this helps, N
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Originally posted by: Casey_B

Hello lmad,

You mention that you want to stripe " to gain more space"

RAID 0 will not give you more capacity on the drives.

AIX has a very powerful volume manager...You can add new
disks to a volume group, and you can extend the size of logical
volumes. This allows you to grow filesystems to span more than
one disk. This may be what you are looking for...

You should probably pick up an AIX redbook on LVM,
or on systems administration. They will help illustrate the
concepts, and help you understand better what you are able to accomplish
with LVM.
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

Hope this helps
Casey
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

You mention space, but you also mention striping. To get your LVs striped across both disks (or all disks, depending what you have configured) you can set the

code INTER-POLICY code

for the LVs to max. What this does is allocate the PPs acros all the available physical volumes. Striping in essence, but limited to the PP size.

Also, you gotta do this when creating the LV.
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Originally posted by: Emittim3@Sirius

Yes, Inter-policy set to maximum could be considered striping, in the most general of the term. It will indeed allow you to 'balance' disk usage across disks in the volume group (defined at the logical volume level). However, it is incorrect to state that you can only set the inter-policy to minimum or maximum at logical volume creation time. You can change this setting and run a 'reorgvg' command on the logical volume well after it has been created to re-distribute the physical partitions (PP).
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