Making an available disk a physical volume

A disk must be configured as a physical volume before it can be assigned to volume groups and used by the LVM.

Use the following instructions to configure a physical volume:

  1. Ensure the disk is known to the operating system, is available, and is not being used by the operating system or any applications. Type the lspv command on the command line. The output looks similar to the following:
       hdisk1  none                     none
    Check the output for the following:
    • If the new disk's name does not appear in command output, refer to Configuring a disk.
    • If the second field of the output shows a system-generated physical volume identifier (PVID) (for example, 00005264d21adb2e), the disk is already configured as a physical volume and you do not have to complete this procedure.
    • If the third field of the output shows a volume group name (for example, rootvg), the disk is currently being used and is not an appropriate choice for this procedure.

    If the new disk has no PVID and is not in use, continue with the next step.

  2. To change an available disk to a physical volume, type the chdev command on the command line. For example:
    chdev -l hdisk3 -a pv=yes
    The -l flag specifies the device name of the disk. The -a flag specifies the device attribute-value pair, pv=yes, which makes the disk a physical volume and writes a boot record with a unique physical volume identifier onto the disk (if it does not already have one).

At this point, the disk is defined as a physical volume. You can type the lspv command on the command line to list the new disk entry.