VIOS & cloning vdisks   

Does anyone know if it's possible to clone a vdisk from the VIOS?? Since a virtualized disk for an LPAR is backed up for an LV on the VIOS, being able to clone that LV will be great for maintenance, backup and recovery purposes.

Hello,

what steps are needed to clone vdisks?

Best Regards

Hello,

a problem occurs during the command cplv.

The message text: cplv: Source logical volume rootvg is open.
umount file system on this logical volume.

Is it possible to clone the lv while it´s under use.

Regards
Klaus
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Hello,

the same error occurs.
0516-741 cplv: Source logical volume rootvg is open.

Did your system were running, when you cloned this rootvg?

Greetings,
Klaus
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Klaus,

I am sorry, you are right, the LV should be closed.

Greetings,

MarkieMark

I'm going to test the cplv command, and let you know how it goes..
Tks.

To save yourself some work, you need not remove your LV to virtual disk mapping. After you shutdown the client LPAR simply run "rmdev -dev <vdevicename> -ucfg" and that will close the LV.

I suspect there are some issues with cloning to be aware of. Duplicate IP addresses, you'll probably have to reconfigure RSCT, etc...I think there have been some techsupport web site hints and tips published regarding cloning in an LPAR/DLPAR environment.

The problem with virtual ethernet (if used) is that you cannot pull the plug until you reconfigure the cloned LPARs IP address. However, I suppose you could temporarily put the virtual ethernet adapters for the cloned LPAR on their own VLANs.

I hope that helps...I wanted to make sure you were all aware of the first point, the rest is some thinking out loud regarding this cloning process. 8^)

Hi Everyone!

I have been using alt disk install for the APV classes I have been holding worldwide and it really works well. So far, over 1600 Students worldwide for the APV Hands-On Lab in less than 12 months, and 500+ students have used this method this year with no major issues. Prior to that, we used NIM to load the partitions from a mksysb resource.

I simply map an additional disk into the partition I want to clone, then specify the flags that clear the device configuration so I don't have to deal with dupe IP addresses, etc.

I then use dd with 8MB clock size to clone the LV to our NIM server (It's a convenient NFS server).

In the class, we load 30 4GB NIM environments on 15 p520's in about 20 minutes by dd'ing an image from an NFS server to the primary LV for the client LPAR. I keep the lv (or lun) size as small as possible for the client rootvg's to speed things up.

Each student has their own VIO server (2 on each system so we have no single point of failure) with SCSI disk.

We then mirror the rootvg of the client environment to a disk mapped from the alternate vio server so both VIO servers have a copy of the rootvg of the client partitions since we are using SCSI.

topas shows a consistent 112-115 megabytes per second on the NFS server during the loads. It actually reports 115K KBPS. We are saturating the Gig-E network since we are using a single adapter. More speed would be available by aggregating more ethernet adapters into the NIM environment (the NFS server).

Note: A single 4GB lun load runs about 3 minutes! The results would be even faster if we were mapping to SAN disk.

Ralph T. Johnson
Advanced Power Virtualization Hands-On Lab Designer and Instructor.