HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite for VERITAS manual VxVM Features

computing environments and Storage Area Network (SAN) environments. Through RAID support, VxVM protects against disk and hardware failure. Additionally, VxVM provides features that offer fault tolerance and fast recovery from disk failure.

VxVM overcomes physical restrictions imposed by hardware disk devices, by providing a logical volume management layer. This enables volumes to span multiple disks. VxVM also dynamically configures disk storage while the system is active.

VxVM Features

Veritas Volume Manager supports the following features:

•Veritas Enterprise Administrator (VEA)

A Java™-based graphical user interface for administering VxVM.

•Concatenation

Concatenation maps data in a linear manner onto one or more subdisks in a plex.

•Striping

Striping maps data, so that data is interleaved among two or more physical disks.

•Mirroring

Mirroring uses multiple mirrors to duplicate information contained in a volume.

•Mirrored Stripes

VxVM supports a combination of mirroring and striping.

•Striped Mirrors

VxVM supports a combination of striping and mirroring.

•RAID-5

RAID-5 provides data redundancy using parity.

•Online Resizing of Volumes

You can dynamically resize VxVM volumes while the data remains available to the user.

•Hot-relocation

The hot-relocation feature in VxVM automatically detects disk failures, and notifies the system administrators of the failure, by email. Hot-relocation also attempts to use spare disks and frees disk space to restore redundancy and to preserve access to mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.

•Volume Resynchronization

Volume resynchronization ensures that all copies of the data match, when mirroring redundant copies of data.

•Online Relayout

Online relayout enables you to convert between storage layouts in VxVM, with uninterrupted data access.

•Volume Snapshot

Volume Snapshots are point in time images of VxVM volumes.

10 Introduction