Volume manager and SAN

[Shivkumar]

Hi All,

If someone knows SAN then is it important to know Volume Manager tool like Vertias or LVM in great detail ?

I am plannning to switch my career to pure Sys Admin supporting os like HP-UX, AIX and Solaris etc but my knowledge in volume manager is at primitive level. I am also planning to go for training in SAN.

Thanks,
Shiv

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Yes, you definitely still need to understand volume managers.

Being familiar with the SAN is good, but volume managers are still important. Pnce the disks have been set up on the SAN and presented to the system that will use them you also need to be able to utilize a volume manager to make the disks usable on the system.

Creating a VG, LV, mounting the LV and creating a filesystem on the mount point still have to be done with a SAN disk. The exception may be if you are using raw volumes for databases. But you may still add the disk(s) to a VG and LV, but use the raw LV for storage rather than the raw disk itself.

[Shivkumar]

Can someone suggest which is the most widely used Volume Manager on HP-UX, AIX and Solaris for enterprise level so that i can go for training for it ?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Shiv:

My guess is that LVM would be the predominate volume manager by instances. HP-UX and AIX volume management with LVM are quite similar. There are some interesting comments here:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1335159

Regards!

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

I agree with JRF. On HP-UX and AIX most folks probably use the built-in LVM.

Sun uses Veritas volume manager, I think.

If you have a shop that has ALL 3 flavors of Unix, then you MIGHT have standardized on Veritas, but you should find that out before you start training.