Background Information for Renaming Volumes

The metarename command with the -x option can exchange the names of volumes that have a parent-child relationship. For more information, see How to Rename a Volume and the metarename(1M) man page.

Solaris Volume Manager enables you to rename most types of volumes at any time, subject to some constraints.

Renaming volumes or switching volume names is an administrative convenience for management of volume names. For example, you could arrange all file system mount points in a desired numeric range. You might rename volumes to maintain a naming scheme for your logical volumes or to allow a transactional volume to use the same name as the underlying volume had been using.

Before you rename a volume, make sure that it is not currently in use. For a file system, make sure it is not mounted or being used as swap. Other applications using the raw device, such as a database, should have their own way of stopping access to the data.

Specific considerations for renaming volumes include the following:

• You can rename any volume except the following:

  • Soft partitions

  • Volumes on which soft partitions are directly built

  • Volumes that are being used as log devices

  • Hot spare pools

• You can rename volumes within a disk set. However, you cannot rename volumes to move them from one disk set to another.

You can use either the Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console or the command line (the metarename(1M) command) to rename volumes.