528 Glossary

The disk containing the root file system. This disk may be under VxVM control.

root file system

The initial file system mounted as part of the UNIX kernel startup sequence.

root partition

The disk region on which the root file system resides.

root volume

The VxVM volume that contains the root file system, if such a volume is designated by the system configuration.

rootability

The ability to place the root file system and the swap device under VxVM control. The resulting volumes can then be mirrored to provide redundancy and allow recovery in the event of disk failure.

secondary path

In Active/Passive disk arrays, the paths to a disk other than the primary path are called secondary paths. A disk is supposed to be accessed only through the primary path until it fails, after which ownership of the disk is transferred to one of the secondary paths. Also see path and primary path.

sector

A unit of size, which can vary between systems. Sector size is set per device (hard drive, CD-ROM, and so on). Although all devices within a system are usually configured to the same sector size for interoperability, this is not always the case. A sector is commonly 1024 bytes.

shared disk group

A disk group in which access to the disks is shared by multiple hosts (also referred to as a cluster-shareable disk group). Also see private disk group.

shared volume

A volume that belongs to a shared disk group and is open on more than one node of a cluster at the same time.

shared VM disk

A VM disk that belongs to a shared disk group in a cluster.

slave node

A node that is not designated as the master node of a cluster.

slice

The standard division of a logical disk device. The terms partition and slice are sometimes used synonymously.

snapshot

A point-in-time copy of a volume (volume snapshot) or a file system (file system snapshot).

spanning

A layout technique that permits a volume (and its file system or database) that is too large to fit on a single disk to be configured across multiple physical disks.

sparse plex