Recently in our VM environment I was installing SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and wanted to move some large volume groups from a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 virtual machine. Just like most things in the UNIX world, you can do this type of task in many different ways. I chose in this case to move the dasd over to the new machine and the dasd all belonged to the volume group I wanted to move. The only minor issue is that the volume group had the exact same name as one that already existed on the server I was moving to. Not a problem, here is what I did.
The first thing I did was unmount the filesystems that were mounted on the volume group. Then I did a vgchange to make the volume group unavailable.
vgchange -a n VG01
Then I did a vgrename, because as I said, the same volume group name already existed on the new server. This seemed like the best way to deal with that issue.
vgrename /dev/VG01 /dev/VG02
Then I did a vgexport to properly make the volume group unknown to the system.
vgexport /dev/VG02
I made the dasd unavailable to the old machine and made it available to the new SLES9 server. When the dasd was there, I did a vgimport specifying the name and pointing it toward the dasd I just brought over.
vgimport VG02 /dev/dasde1 /dev/dasdg1
I issued a mount of my filesystems and there you have it. Everything was just as it was on the old system. No waiting for restores or anything like that. In my case only needing to change /etc/zipl.conf, issue a few commands and reboot, this seemed like the quickest method to move the dasd.
