Veritas™ Volume Manager Administrator's Guide
- Understanding Veritas Volume Manager
- VxVM and the operating system
- How VxVM handles storage management
- Volume layouts in VxVM
- Online relayout
- Volume resynchronization
- Dirty region logging
- Volume snapshots
- FastResync
- Provisioning new usable storage
- Administering disks
- Disk devices
- Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
- Discovering disks and dynamically adding disk arrays
- How to administer the Device Discovery Layer
- Changing the disk-naming scheme
- Adding a disk to VxVM
- Rootability
- Displaying disk information
- Removing disks
- Removing and replacing disks
- Administering Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- How DMP works
- Administering DMP using vxdmpadm
- Gathering and displaying I/O statistics
- Specifying the I/O policy
- Online dynamic reconfiguration
- Reconfiguring a LUN online that is under DMP control
- Creating and administering disk groups
- About disk groups
- Displaying disk group information
- Creating a disk group
- Importing a disk group
- Moving disk groups between systems
- Handling cloned disks with duplicated identifiers
- Handling conflicting configuration copies
- Reorganizing the contents of disk groups
- Destroying a disk group
- Creating and administering subdisks and plexes
- Displaying plex information
- Reattaching plexes
- Creating volumes
- Types of volume layouts
- Creating a volume
- Using vxassist
- Creating a volume on specific disks
- Creating a mirrored volume
- Creating a striped volume
- Creating a volume using vxmake
- Initializing and starting a volume
- Using rules and persistent attributes to make volume allocation more efficient
- Administering volumes
- Displaying volume information
- Monitoring and controlling tasks
- Reclamation of storage on thin reclamation arrays
- Stopping a volume
- Resizing a volume
- Adding a mirror to a volume
- Preparing a volume for DRL and instant snapshots
- Adding traditional DRL logging to a mirrored volume
- Enabling FastResync on a volume
- Performing online relayout
- Adding a RAID-5 log
- Creating and administering volume sets
- Configuring off-host processing
- Administering hot-relocation
- How hot-relocation works
- Moving relocated subdisks
- Administering cluster functionality (CVM)
- Overview of clustering
- Multiple host failover configurations
- CVM initialization and configuration
- Dirty region logging in cluster environments
- Administering VxVM in cluster environments
- Changing the CVM master manually
- Importing disk groups as shared
- Administering sites and remote mirrors
- About sites and remote mirrors
- Fire drill - testing the configuration
- Changing the site name
- Administering the Remote Mirror configuration
- Failure and recovery scenarios
- Performance monitoring and tuning
- Appendix A. Using Veritas Volume Manager commands
- Appendix B. Configuring Veritas Volume Manager
Striping (RAID-0)
Striping (RAID-0) is useful if you need large amounts of data written to or read from physical disks, and performance is important. Striping is also helpful in balancing the I/O load from multi-user applications across multiple disks. By using parallel data transfer to and from multiple disks, striping significantly improves data-access performance.
Striping maps data so that the data is interleaved among two or more physical disks. A striped plex contains two or more subdisks, spread out over two or more physical disks. Data is allocated alternately and evenly to the subdisks of a striped plex.
The subdisks are grouped into "columns," with each physical disk limited to one column. Each column contains one or more subdisks and can be derived from one or more physical disks. The number and sizes of subdisks per column can vary. Additional subdisks can be added to columns, as necessary.
Warning:
Striping a volume, or splitting a volume across multiple disks, increases the chance that a disk failure will result in failure of that volume.
If five volumes are striped across the same five disks, then failure of any one of the five disks will require that all five volumes be restored from a backup. If each volume is on a separate disk, only one volume has to be restored. (As an alternative to or in conjunction with striping, use mirroring or RAID-5 to substantially reduce the chance that a single disk failure results in failure of a large number of volumes.)
Data is allocated in equal-sized stripe units that are interleaved between the columns. Each stripe unit is a set of contiguous blocks on a disk. The default stripe unit size is 64 kilobytes.
Figure: Striping across three columns shows an example with three columns in a striped plex, six stripe units, and data striped over the three columns.
A stripe consists of the set of stripe units at the same positions across all columns. In the figure, stripe units 1, 2, and 3 constitute a single stripe.
Viewed in sequence, the first stripe consists of:
stripe unit 1 in column 0
stripe unit 2 in column 1
stripe unit 3 in column 2
The second stripe consists of:
stripe unit 4 in column 0
stripe unit 5 in column 1
stripe unit 6 in column 2
Striping continues for the length of the columns (if all columns are the same length), or until the end of the shortest column is reached. Any space remaining at the end of subdisks in longer columns becomes unused space.
Figure: Example of a striped plex with one subdisk per column shows a striped plex with three equal sized, single-subdisk columns.
There is one column per physical disk. This example shows three subdisks that occupy all of the space on the VM disks. It is also possible for each subdisk in a striped plex to occupy only a portion of the VM disk, which leaves free space for other disk management tasks.
Figure: Example of a striped plex with concatenated subdisks per column shows a striped plex with three columns containing subdisks of different sizes.
Each column contains a different number of subdisks. There is one column per physical disk. Striped plexes can be created by using a single subdisk from each of the VM disks being striped across. It is also possible to allocate space from different regions of the same disk or from another disk (for example, if the size of the plex is increased). Columns can also contain subdisks from different VM disks.
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