Thursday, July 12, 2018

How to clone mirrored rootvg to target disks on IBM AIX

I want to clone mirrored rootvg to target disks on one of aix server. After cloning, need to rename the alternate boot environment "tm_v6".Here the system status,

# lsvg -p rootvg
rootvg:
PV_NAME           PV STATE          TOTAL PPs   FREE PPs    FREE DISTRIBUTION
hdisk1            active            xxx         xxx         107..50..71..107..107
hdisk3            active            xxx         xxx         107..50..71..107..107
# lspv
hdisk0          00xxxxxxxxxxxxxx                    old_rootvg
hdisk1          00xxxxxxxxxxxxxx                    rootvg          active
hdisk2          00xxxxxxxxxxxxxx                    old_rootvg
hdisk3          00xxxxxxxxxxxxxx                    rootvg          active

In order to create a clone of the currently running system to an alternate set of disks "alt_disk_copy" is the way to go.
This is the command behind "smit alt_clone" skullnobrains pointed you to.

The smit shortcut is useful if you want to apply fixes, fix packs or a full TL to the system during the copy process.

However, if you want to copy your system to a second machine you cannot use "smit_clone", because the smit menu behind that shortcut does not allow for entering a required flag: "-O".

The "-O" flag is meant  to force a device reset on the target altinst_rootvg, so obsolete device info (which might cause hardware conflicts on the target machine) and network info (which will cause an IP address conflict when booting the cloned machine) is not retained.

So the command to use would be

alt_disk_copy -BOd hdisk0 hdisk2

Please remember to delete the old_rootvg beforehand, by means of

alt_rootvg_op -X old_rootvg

Anyway, for duplicating a system I'd rather suggest the classic "mksysb" way.

This also allows for not retaining the original device info and network settings, so you will not run into IP address conflicts and can happily assign new IP parameters later.

It also spares you the effort of transporting the cloned disk to the other machine, be it physically or via SAN reconfiguration.

You can use an mksysb image on DVD, tape or residing on a possibly available NIM server to clone your system.

No comments:

Post a Comment