Understanding Veritas Volume Manager 35

Volume layouts in VxVM

Layout methods

Data in virtual objects is organized to create volumes by using the following layout methods:

Concatenation and spanning

Striping (RAID-0)

Mirroring (RAID-1)

Striping plus mirroring (mirrored-stripe or RAID-0+1)

Mirroring plus striping (striped-mirror,RAID-1+0 or RAID-10)

RAID-5 (striping with parity)

The following sections describe each layout method.

Concatenation and spanning

Concatenation maps data in a linear manner onto one or more subdisks in a plex. To access all of the data in a concatenated plex sequentially, data is first accessed in the first subdisk from beginning to end. Data is then accessed in the remaining subdisks sequentially from beginning to end, until the end of the last subdisk.

The subdisks in a concatenated plex do not have to be physically contiguous and can belong to more than one VM disk. Concatenation using subdisks that reside on more than one VM disk is called spanning.

Figure 1-12shows the concatenation of two subdisks from the same VM disk. The blocks n, n+1, n+2 and n+3 (numbered relative to the start of the plex) are contiguous on the plex, but actually come from two distinct subdisks on the same physical disk.

The remaining free space in the subdisk, disk01-02, on VM disk, disk01, can be put to other uses.