As is often true with Veritas Volume Manager, you can work with layered volumes in two ways: vxmake or vxassist. Using vxmake you can build each object one-by-one until you have a finished volume. Alternately, you can use vxassist in one of several ways, to build the layered volume for you. We will address both methods bellow, but let me say that it is NOT recommended that you build layered volumes via vxmake, there are just too may places you can make a mistake that you won't see until its too late. I will step through the vxmake process only to give you a better idea of how everything works together, and I do recommend that you try it if you have a system that is designated as TEST ONLY, and data isn't important (at all). Vxassist is far easier and safer to work with, as you'll see. Layered volumes aren't difficult at all with the use of the tool. We'll look at vxmake first.