HP-UX - Securepath or LVM

[Dave Hutton]

Theres really only 2 reasons why we use Securepath on our HPUX servers to our EVA3000 and 5000.

The loadbalanceing. Which we don't care a whole lot about.

More importantly is, HBA failover. You can't do (Or at least isn't supported pvlinks).

Originally we were told we didn't need Securepath. When we went to pvlink, we had nothing but problems. Trying to get support was even worse.

With the new EVA's my understanding is you can use pvlinks. EVA4000, 6000 and 8000.

[Peyman Javaheri · Accepted solution]

We originally went to secure path for support reasons, too.

Secure path does not buy you anything other than what you read above.
You see a very good explanation of LVM, too.

With LVM (at least in this state) you will loose resizing flexibility of using one LUN. You could add multiple LUNs to one lvol, but that creates LUN management nightmares in a large environment after a while. LVM was good for the old days of working with many disks, now your disk array does that for you.

On the other hand, if you have software RAID (in hpux's case only in LVM), you will have a lot of flexibility in copying data on the fly (i.e. For backups and load-balancing across arrays).

Now I am stuck in LVM, but in the future here is what I will do:

Use LVM in places that I see need for software/script manipulation of large data like backups (with no snapshots) and performance improvements.
Not use LVM where I would need to resize mounts online with no automation needs.

Regards,
peyman;