Manually Configured Files

Overview of the md.tab File

The /etc/lvm/md.tab file contains Solaris Volume Manager configuration information that can be used to reconstruct your Solaris Volume Manager configuration. Solaris Volume Manager can use this file as input to the command line utilities metainit, metadb, and metahs to reconstruct a configuration. Volumes, disk sets, and hot spare pools might have entries in this file. See How to Create Configuration Files for instructions on creating this file (using metastat -p > /etc/lvm/md.tab).

The configuration information in the /etc/lvm/md.tab file might differ from the current volumes, hot spares, and state database replicas in use. It is used manually, by the system administrator, to capture the intended configuration. After you change your Solaris Volume Manager configuration, recreate this file and preserve a backup copy.

Once you have created and updated the file, the metainit, metahs, and metadb commands then activate the volumes, hot spare pools, and state database replicas defined in the file.

In the /etc/lvm/md.tab file, one complete configuration entry for a single volume appears on each line using the syntax of the metainit, metadb, and metahs commands.

If you use metainit -an to simulate initializing all of the volumes in md.tab, you may see error messages for volumes that have dependencies on other volumes defined in md.tab. This occurs because Solaris Volume Manager does not maintain state of the volumes that would have been created when running metainit -an, so each line is evaluated based on the existing configuration, if a configuration exists. Therefore, even if it appears that metainit -an would fail, it might succeed without the -n option.

You then run the metainit command with either the -a option, to activate all volumes in the /etc/lvm/md.tab file, or with the volume name that corresponds to a specific entry in the file.

Solaris Volume Manager does not write to or store configuration information in the /etc/lvm/md.tab file. You must edit the file by hand and run the metainit, metahs, or metadb commands to create Solaris Volume Manager components.

For more information, see the md.tab(4) man page.