Standards

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Logical Volume Name Standards

This document describes the standards for assigning AIX Logical Volume (LV) names. A single standard has been developed for use in standalone, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery environments. This LV naming standard provides the mechanism to assign enterprise wide unique names to all AIX LV's and will eliminate naming conflicts in the event of a manual or automated failover, or if multiple instances of an application are running on a single server.

To assign enterprise wide unique LV names, the system administrator must first define the resource groups names. Once the resource group names have been defined, then a Volume Group (VG) must be defined based on the RG name. After the VG has been created, LV's can be assigned. A VG will typically contain several LV's, and each LV will be named based on the resource group to which it is associated.

To define a LV name, obtain the 8 character resource group name, then add a 4 digit logical volume sequence identifier that will uniquely identify the LV, followed by the characters "lv". The 4 digit LV sequence identifier will consist of alpha-numeric characters and must always be exactly 4 characters in length. The LV name will always end with the characters "lv".

The LV name shall consist of exactly 14 characters with the following structure:

ApplicationCode + Environment + Function + Company + Sequence ID + LV Sequence ID + "lv"
     3 char     +    1 char   +  1 char  +  2 char +   1 char    +      4 char    + 2 char

As an example, a resource group named "egaapmx0", may have a volume group named "egaapmx00vg". This volume group may have multiple LV's associated with it:

RG Name Component	LV Sequence Identifier	LV Identifier	LV Name
egaapmx0	db20	lv	egaapmx0db20lv
egaapmx0	db21	lv	egaapmx0db21lv
egaapmx0	db22	lv	egaapmx0db22lv

JFS filesystems will require a logical volume for the JFS log. This must also have an enterprise wide unique name.