516Configuring Veritas Volume Manager

Guidelines for configuring storage

If more than one plex of a mirrored volume is striped, configure the same stripe-unit size for each striped plex.

Where possible, distribute the subdisks of a striped volume across drives connected to different controllers and buses.

Avoid the use of controllers that do not support overlapped seeks. (Such controllers are rare.)

The vxassist command automatically applies and enforces many of these rules when it allocates space for striped plexes in a volume.

For more information, see Striping (RAID-0) on page 38.RAID-5 guidelinesRefer to the following guidelines when using RAID-5.In general, the guidelines for mirroring and striping together also apply toRAID-5. The following guidelines should also be observed with RAID-5:

Only one RAID-5 plex can exist per RAID-5 volume (but there can be multiple log plexes).

The RAID-5 plex must be derived from at least three subdisks on three or more physical disks. If any log plexes exist, they must belong to disks other than those used for the RAID-5 plex.

RAID-5 logs can be mirrored and striped.

If the volume length is not explicitly specified, it is set to the length of any RAID-5 plex associated with the volume; otherwise, it is set to zero. If you specify the volume length, it must be a multiple of the stripe-unit size of the associated RAID-5 plex, if any.

If the log length is not explicitly specified, it is set to the length of the smallest RAID-5 log plex that is associated, if any. If no RAID-5 log plexes are associated, it is set to zero.

Sparse RAID-5 log plexes are not valid.RAID-5 volumes are not supported for sharing in a cluster.For more information, see RAID-5 (striping with parity)” on page 45.Hot-relocation guidelines

Hot-relocation automatically restores redundancy and access to mirrored and RAID-5 volumes when a disk fails. This is done by relocating the affected subdisks to disks designated as spares and/or free space in the same disk group.