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
TOPICS: AIX, BACKUP & RESTORE, SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION↑
Lsmksysb
There's a simple command to list information about a mksysb image, called lsmksysb:
# lsmksysb -lf mksysb.image
VOLUME GROUP: rootvg
BACKUP DATE/TIME: Mon Jun 6 04:00:06 MST 2011
UNAME INFO: AIX testaix1 1 6 0008CB1A4C00
BACKUP OSLEVEL: 6.1.6.0
MAINTENANCE LEVEL: 6100-06
BACKUP SIZE (MB): 49920
SHRINK SIZE (MB): 17377
VG DATA ONLY: no
rootvg:
LV NAME TYPE LPs PPs PVs LV STATE MOUNT POINT
hd5 boot 1 2 2 closed/syncd N/A
hd6 paging 32 64 2 open/syncd N/A
hd8 jfs2log 1 2 2 open/syncd N/A
hd4 jfs2 8 16 2 open/syncd /
hd2 jfs2 40 80 2 open/syncd /usr
hd9var jfs2 40 80 2 open/syncd /var
hd3 jfs2 40 80 2 open/syncd /tmp
hd1 jfs2 8 16 2 open/syncd /home
hd10opt jfs2 8 16 2 open/syncd /opt
dumplv1 sysdump 16 16 1 open/syncd N/A
dumplv2 sysdump 16 16 1 open/syncd N/A
hd11admin jfs2 1 2 2 open/syncd /admin
