LVM vs VxVM

[F.V. Porcella]

I was wondering if anyone else noticed that HP seems to be hedging its bet's. By this I mean the mad rush to abbandon LVM in favour of VxVM.

Any one else notice this?

[Mark Greene_1]

What do you mean by "mad rush"? Veritas products have been supported for a while now. It's the default on both Sun and Compaq's Tru64 (and was the case before Digital got bought by Compaq). This puts HP on a more equal footing from a functional standpoint with Sun and IBM.

[Mark Landin]

Yes it's hardly anything "new".

VxVM has some great functionality in it. HP would like to sell you the "full" VxVM product, and it has no hope of doing that until you are at least ready to adopt the "free" basic VxVM instead of LVM.

[Stuart Abramson_2]

I haven't seen any "mad rush". In fact if you could conduct a survey, I bet you would see that MOST HP-UX installations use the "native" LVM vxfs file system, NOT the VxVM file system.

My experience based on some experience with SUN systems is that you can get along just fine with HP-UX vxfs file systems, and you don't get anything more desireable from VxVM.

Stuart

[blal]

Hi

VxVM offers more features.VxVM will become the default in future HP-Unix releases.

regds,
baiju.

[Stuart Abramson_2]

My guess would be that HP offers the software for marketing "comparison" purposes.

So that if a prospective customer asks if they offer VxVM, they can say "yes".

[David Child_1]

There have been several posts related to this. I believe that you will find that HP may not be pushing quite as hard in the direction of VxVM. Personally I would be happy if VxVM remained optional. I think that once they roll the Tru64 file system and volume management features into LVM there will be no compelling reason for VxVM.

As for being on the same footing as Sun and and IBM, HP is already in a better spot than Sun and about as good as IBM (with Sun you pretty much have to go with VxVM because their DiskSuite isn't too good; IBMs native volume manager is very similar to HPs (with a few nice features)).

I for one am keeping our servers on LVM until we have to go to VxVM (we have to deal with VxVM enough on our Sun servers). Hopefully that day will never come.

David

[Alzhy]

The issue here IHMO is not "vs" but when to use which and if you have to use VxVM or LVM. There probably is no mad rush to go VxVM except for those sights already using it on Solaris, AIX, Linux and Win2k.. I came from a mostly Solaris shop until lately where we are now deploying new apps on HP servers -- LVM is good for small to mid-sized implementations but for larger implementations -- specially SAN or High End Array connected environments -- I would not settle for anything less than VxVM. All of our skills sets and scripts work perfectly on HPUX environments with VxVM...

BTW, in case you don't know yet -- rootability is very well integrated with VxVM on HPUX 11i where the version is now at par with Solaris (3.5). At Version 4.0, diskgroups will be portable -- meaning deport on Solaris, import on HP or Linux or NT/2K... I guess VxFS will also be compatible soon accross platforms.

For sites running SecurePath (Compaq Storageworks HSG80 and EVA, etc..) you can do away with just the free base VxVM -- as it already supports striping. Moreover, mirroring comes free but only on the rootdg disks.

[Manish Bharadwaj]

Hi All

Please correct me if I am wrong.
I believe HP donot had much choice and have to bend towards VXVM because they cannot get HPUX booting on Itanium platform without VXVM.

On Itanimun you have to boot from VXVM and than you can use lvm for non-root volumes.

SUN was using VXVM for long tine because VXVM use to come free with SUN Storage and customer donot have to pay anything for it but now veritas/sun has changed their licensing and it donot comes free with SUN storage. SUN has changed name for solaris disksuite and now they call it Solaris Volume Manager (SVM). Mostly sun is not trying hard to sell VXVM with any fibre connected storage because they have released a product called as SUN traffic manager which can be used instead of veritas DMP. As far as RAID is concern mostly people use hardware RAID as compair to software for performance reasons.

Conclusion SUN always kept the option of hard partitioning and disksuite which made them easy to convince customers that they can survive without VXVM due to increased cost.
HP needs to think very closely before discarding VXVM as customers may endup paying money for using VXVM in future due to change in market conditions etc.

Regards,
Manish

[RolandH]

@Manish,

you are wrong! Not necessary to boot from VxVM Volume on Itanium based systems. It could also be a LVM Volume.

@Nelson
I absolutly agree with you I think thats the reason for HP do give a altenativ to LVM. Because LVM has some restrictions which could be a great problem in end-array environments.
See this thread for example:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x163c92c6e4a1ee4cb3b256b725ddc991,00.html


Roland