How to use a LUN larger than 2TB with Veritas Volume Manager (VXVM)

If you want to use LUN’s larger than 2TB with VXVM on a LINUX host you need to use parted instead of fdiske to create partitions. fdisk is limited to 2TB partitions. The CDS feature is a no-go as well

We assume disk is sdu. Before VxVM can use the disk, it must have a GPT label

# parted /dev/sdu mklabel gpt (the change is instant !!!!)

The default format for vxdisksetup is CDS format, we can’t use so we revert to the old format:

# /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -i sdu format=simple

From here it’s business as usual 😀

Some links to Symantec support pages (will open a new browser window):

Initializing a LUN that is greater than 2TB creates usable space equal to, or less than 2TB with Volume Manager 5.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 3 or higher.