312Administering volume snapshots

Cascaded snapshots

to recover the mirror volume in the same way as for a DISABLED volume. See “Starting a volume” on page 271.

If you resize (that is, grow or shrink) a volume, all its ACTIVE linked mirror volumes are also resized at the same time. The volume and its mirrors can be in the same disk group or in different disk groups. If the operation is successful, the volume and its mirrors will have the same size.

If a volume has been grown, a resynchronization of the grown regions in its linked mirror volumes is started, and the links remain in the ATTACHING state until resynchronization is complete. The vxsnap snapwait command can be used to wait for the state to become ACTIVE.

When you use the vxsnap make command to create the snapshot volume, this removes the link, and establishes a snapshot relationship between the snapshot volume and the original volume.

The vxsnap reattach operation re-establishes the link relationship between the two volumes, and starts a resynchronization of the mirror volume.

See “Creating and managing linked break-off snapshot volumes” on page 331 for details of the procedures for creating and using this type of snapshot.

For information about how to prepare an empty volume for use by full-sized instant snapshots, see “Creating a volume for use as a full-sized instant or linked break-off snapshot” on page 323.

Cascaded snapshots

A snapshot hierarchy known as a snapshot cascade can improve write performance for some applications. Instead of having several independent snapshots of the volume, it is more efficient to make the older snapshots into children of the latest snapshot as shown in Figure 9-4.

Figure 9-4

Snapshot cascade

Original volume

V

Most recent

snapshot

Snapshot

volume

Sn

Snapshot

volume

Sn-1

. . .

Oldest

snapshot

Snapshot

volume

S1

A snapshot may be added to a cascade by specifying the infrontof attribute to the vxsnap make command when the second and subsequent snapshots in the cascade are created. Changes to blocks in the original volume are only written to the most recently created snapshot volume in the cascade. If an attempt is made

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HP Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 -UX 11i v3 manual Cascaded snapshots