Encapsulate boot disk?

[Anthony deRito]

Hello all. I would like your input on the pros and cons of encapsulating the root disk with Veritas Volume Manager. The question of whether or not to have your boot disk under Veritas VM control is a debate here. Please advise based on your experiences.

Thank you.

Tony

[Rick Garland]

Most of my experience is with VxVM in a Solaris environment. The Veritas is Veritas, be it on SUN or HP.

I know of mostly cons of encapsulated the root disk.

The biggest con to me is the inability to do upgrades to the OS with root encapsulation.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Tony,

We don't put the boot/root drives under VxVM control simply based on economics. Even with Mission Critical OE, DMP (Dynamic Multi-Pathing) is an extra cost from Veritas. Whereas pathing is included in all OE versions from HP because it's a fundamental feature of good ole LVM.
And, as earlier stated, there are several thing that are much more difficult when the OS is encapsulated by VxVM.
Now we have quite a few system - Oracle DB servers mainly - that do have VxVM disk groups, but the OS - including secondary swap - is always LVM.
A final reason is that we've had quite a few more Veritas patch & version issues arise then we've ever had for LVM. I'm sure you can understand the impact to a server when the OS VG is suddenly unavailable or becomes corrupted.

My 2 cents,
Jeff

[Ranjit_3]

Hi Tony ,
We can encapsulate the boot disk with VxVM .This will be used if you have to mirror the rootdg ( root disk ) .
Without encapsulating we can't mirror the volumes under rootdg with Veritas features .
If you have to upgrade the O.S anytime later in future ,scripts for unencapsulating the root disks are used .

Bye...

Check out : http://support.veritas.com for any query .

[Anthony deRito]

Ranjit, the only way to mirror the volumes on the root disk using Veritas is to encapsulate using Veritas, correct? If you did not want to mirror the volumes with Veritas, would you need to encapsulate the boot disk? What reasons would you not want to encapsulate the boot disk with Veritas? I am looking for pros and cons of encapsulating the boot disk with Veritas.

Tony