Topics: AIX, LVM, System Admin

Renaming disk devices

Getting disk devices named the same way on, for example, 2 nodes of a PowerHA cluster, can be really difficult. For us humans though, it's very useful to have the disks named the same way on all nodes, so we can recognize the disks a lot faster, and don't have to worry about picking the wrong disk.

The way to get around this usually involved either creating dummy disk devices or running configuration manager on a specific adapter, like: cfgmgr -vl fcs0. This complicated procedure is not needed any more since AIX 7.1 and AIX 6.1 TL6, because a new command has been made available, called rendev, which is very easy to use for renaming devices:

# lspv
hdisk0  00c8b12ce3c7d496  rootvg  active
hdisk1  00c8b12cf28e737b  None

# rendev -l hdisk1 -n hdisk99

# lspv
hdisk0  00c8b12ce3c7d496  rootvg  active
hdisk99 00c8b12cf28e737b  None




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