Chapter 16

Performance monitoring and tuning

Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) can improve overall system performance by optimizing the layout of data storage on the available hardware. This chapter contains guidelines establishing performance priorities, for monitoring performance, and for configuring your system appropriately.

Performance guidelines

VxVM allows you to optimize data storage performance using the following two strategies:

Balance the I/O load among the available disk drives.

Use striping and mirroring to increase I/O bandwidth to the most frequently accessed data.

VxVM also provides data redundancy (through mirroring and RAID-5) that allows continuous access to data in the event of disk failure.

Data assignment

When deciding where to locate file systems, you, as a system administrator, typically attempt to balance I/O load among the available disk drives. The effectiveness of this approach is limited by the difficulty of anticipating future usage patterns, as well as the inability to split file systems across the drives. For example, if a single file system receives the most disk accesses, moving the file system to another drive also moves the bottleneck to that drive.

VxVM can split volumes across multiple drives. This permits you a finer level of granularity when locating data. After measuring actual access patterns, you can adjust your previous decisions on the placement of file systems. You can reconfigure volumes online without adversely impacting their availability.