Veritas Volume Manager 3.2 features & Licensing

[Carol Yu]

As I saw from some admin guide that Veritas Volume Manager 3.2 is available for HP-UX 11i. And only the basic Veritas is free with HP-UX OS, other features need to buy license.

My question is:
(1) What is the advantage of using veritas over HP-US LVM?
(2) Does the basic Veritas include mirror feature? What features does basic Veritas have?
(3) What are major features of the not basic parts?

Thanks a lot.

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Carol,

(1) VxVM is available on HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Windows, and probably more platforms. If you want to use a consistent tool across all the systems in your enterprise it might be the way to go. VxVM is slightly more flexible than LVM in that more attributes of disks, groups, and volumes can be changed online. VxVM has a pretty GUI. However balanced against this, in my opinion (probably subjective given that I've been using LVM longer) VxVM is more complex, and many people will find that LVM does the job adequately. A few years ago it looked like HP were going to phase out LVM completely in favour of VxVM, but thats changed now that HP have acquired Compaq. Now LVM will be a required component for building Single-System-Image clusters and using clustered file systems when HP finish porting these functions over for Tru64.

(2) No, the base VxVM product does not include mirroring. You can do pretty much the same as LVM without Mirrordisk/UX - i.e. Striping, concatenation, path failover.

(3) The full product allows you to do RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 0+1, and RAID5. It also supports load balancing across multiple paths to devices that support this. So more that MirrorDisk/UX, but then its also more $$$.


HTH

Duncan

[Carol Yu]

Thanks a lot for your reply. I will stick to LVM and the mirror-disk tool from HP then.