HFS vs VXFS

[George_12]

Advantages and disadvantages using HFS or VxFS.

[Stefan Farrelly]

HFS is HP proprietary, VxFS is used across unix flavours (Sun, AIX, Dec etc.)
HFS is old and support will stop for it one day. VxFS is new, has tons of options to tune it, is faster, and has become the industry standard. Its the way of the future.

[Robin Wakefield · Accepted solution]

I lifted this from an old doc -

VxFS:

. Faster recovery versus HFS fsck, due to using intent log

. More robust as there is additional panic avoidance in VxFS code (In many cases where an I/O operation failure would cause HFS to panic, VxFS will mark the file or file system bad instead)

. Better performance, under many circumstances, due to using extents (Unless HFS is running fs_async, which VxFS does not support)

. OnLine VxFS provides ability to do backups, resizing and
defragmentation/reorganization while file system is on-line

. VxFS is HP's strategic file system direction, and new technology will be added to it, not to HFS.

VxFS limitations:

. Does not support HP-UX ACLs, so cannot be trusted system file system

Robin

[Rainer von Bongartz]

you'll see the diffrence once your server might crash and fsck on hfs systems will take horrible long time.

with vxfs we were online again in a couple of minutes

[John Palmer]

One example of new technology being added to VXFS is that the latest version (standard in HP-UX 11i, available for HP-UX 11) now supports ACL's.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi George,

One other advantage of vxfs are the OnlineJFS mount options convosync=direct,mincache=direct which bypass the unix buffers. The idea is that some software (e.g. databases) so their own buffering in shared memory and thus prefer raw/io. The downside of raw/io is the difficulty of management and backup. These mount options give you the benefits of raw/io with none of the drawbacks.

Clay

[Gregory Fruth]

I thought HP's HFS was based on the standard
BSD file system (aka UFS aka FFS) that most
Unixes have.

But anyway, the fsck time on HFS file systems
after a crash or poweroff is just not acceptable
with the large disks you can get these days.

Vxfs disks will fsck almost instantly, and that
alone is enough to justify using it.