veritas volume manager

[Smucker]

I want to get the lists thoughts on VxVM versus LVM - running hp-ux 11.11v1

who is using it?
is it better?
any gotchas?
Disaster Recovery?
Multipahing?
Service Guard?

thanks,
Points to all who respond!

[Jaime Bolanos Rojas. · Accepted solution]

Smucker,

First this thread will give you a lot of info about differences, and will point to more threads that talks about the same.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1033544&admit=-682735245+1154958970145+28353475

In my personal point of view, even thought vxvm is the future, not that many people is using right now, which makes it more difficult to support, the more that peoples knows a product, the better the support for it.
Vxvm, it's still difficult for some sys adms to use. I would not worry about expiration date becuase as far as people wants it and use it, they are going to still have it going.

Regards,

Jaime.

[IT_2007]

Smucker,

Lot of big companies are started converting from LVM to veritas volume manager.
Better to manage big logical volumes whereas LVM can't.
Planning and understanding is required.
Disaster recovery is also easy.
Multipathing - Veritas has its own dump admin tool otherwise EMC powerpath can be used.
HP says they support in Service Guard with VxVM and it will be tricky to adminster it.

[dirk dierickx]

vxvm will be off value to you when you have an hetrogenous environment. but when running only hpux, i guess it doesn't matter that much.

[sathish kannan]

Hi Smucker,

VxVM has additional features (if you purchase full version from Symantec or HP) like concantenated DG, plexes, etc.

With Veritas you can use DMP its multiplathing software which handles I/O well than HP's default PV links.

If you have hetrogenous environment and want to standardise your environment Veritas Volume manager is the option.

I hope VxVm is supported with MCSG aswell.

I hope Symantec (Veritas) has replication manager utilities aswell but I have never used it.

Regards
Sathish

[Smucker]

Thanks for all the opinions and links

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

Let me rant a little bit:

VxFS is mostly attractive for people that are still using disk slices like in the last decade or for multivendor-same-filesystem-and-volume-manager scenarios (aix, hp-ux, solaris, linux)

It's an additional layer of transparency You just don't need if You have a reasonable volumemanger and I hope it gets killed of be ZFS.