Testing VxVM under Vmware

Just downloaded and tested the new "free" Vertias Storage foundation software for Linux in a Vmware instance.
Ran in to a few problems, not unexpected.

First, the prein rpm scripts for VXVM fails if you are on a AMD box. Just run through the install script and manually add VRTSvxvm-common and VRTSvxvm-platform with the --nopre rpm options. After rpm is done just run vxinstall to finalize things.

Now for the second hickup. CDS disks do not work under Vmware. For those of you who are not familiar with cdsdisks it is a new platform independant disk format recently introduced in VxVM. It makes it possible to migrate SAN LUN (or physical disks) from
for instance a HP-UX box to a Solaris box without doing any conversion.
To avoid this problem we need to use the old "simple" disk format. The easiest to always default to this is to create two files under /etc/default.
One file called vxdg with the line cds=off and one file called vxdisk with the line format=simple.

The rest is quite straight forward.

# cat /etc/default/vxdg
cds=off
# cat /etc/default/vxdisk
format=simple
# vxdiskadd sdb sdc
[ enter dg1 when prompted for disk group name ]
[ just hit enter for all other prompts ]
# vxdisk list
DEVICE       TYPE            DISK         GROUP        STATUS
sda          auto:none       -            -            online invalid
sdb          auto:simple     dg101        dg1          online
sdc          auto:simple     dg102        dg1          online
# vxassist -g dg1 make u02 1G layout=mirror
# vxprint
Disk group: dg1

TY NAME         ASSOC        KSTATE   LENGTH   PLOFFS   STATE    TUTIL0  PUTIL0
dg dg1          dg1          -        -        -        -        -       -

dm dg101        sdb          -        37701920 -        -        -       -
dm dg102        sdc          -        37701920 -        -        -       -

v  u02          fsgen        ENABLED  2097152  -        ACTIVE   -       -
pl u02-01       u02          ENABLED  2097152  -        ACTIVE   -       -
sd dg101-01     u02-01       ENABLED  2097152  0        -        -       -
pl u02-02       u02          ENABLED  2097152  -        ACTIVE   -       -
sd dg102-01     u02-02       ENABLED  2097152  0        -        -       -

# mkfs.vxfs /dev/vx/dsk/dg1/u02
# mount /dev/vx/dsk/dg1/u02 /u02
# df /u02
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/vx/dsk/dg1/u02    1048576     17338    966793   2% /u02

Vertias actually let me create 5 user volumes before starting to complain about licensing.
VxVM vxvol WARNING V-5-1-12761 You have exceeded the authorized usage for this product and are out of compliance with your License Agreement. Please email sales_mail@symantec.com or contact your Symantec sales representative for information on how to obtain additional licenses for this product.