volume manager on hpux

[Shivkumar]

Which is the most widely used volume manager software for big enterprises on hpux ?

Thanks,
Shiv

[Torsten.]

IMHO, it is the LVM.

T.

[Indira Aramandla · Accepted solution]

Hi Shiv,

It is LVM

HP-UX was among the first Unix systems to include a built-in logical volume manager a derivative of the Veritas Volume manager (VVM). HP has had a long partnership with Veritas, and they use VxFS as their primary file system. For technical reasons, however, the file system used for the boot KERNEL has remained HFS (a variant of UFS and so this older technology has continued to receive support from HP.

HP has recently announced the availability of VERITAS Volume Manager (tm) 3.5 for HP-UX 11i, a new version of our industry-leading storage virtualization technology that now provides more enhanced features and functionality.

Some of the new features for VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 for HP-UX 11i include:
· Increased manageability through rootability: You can now manage the root disk with the same solution that you use for storage management.
· Reduced cost of ownership through boot mirroring: You no longer need to purchase any additional mirroring software to protect the boot disk (this feature is also available in the lite version of VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5, bundled with HP-UX 11i).
· Improved performance with VERITAS Volume Manager tunables: Tunables have been adjusted to provide better performance monitoring and tuning.
· Easier installation: Improved license key procedures through Vlicense, VERITAS Software's web-enabled license key portal.
· Reduced storage management costs: New VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (tm) GUI enables centralized storage management across heterogeneous operating systems (Unix and Windows).



IA

[Mahesh Kumar Malik]

Hi Shiv

It is Logical Volume Manager being used on hp-ux environment.

Regards
Mahesh

[Jarle Bjorgeengen]

There are only 2 alternatives.

LVM and VxVM.

LVM comes included, and is used by most people.

Only the ones need more advanced features of VxVM (Sw raid5, sw raid1+0 loadbalancing multipathing, clustervolumemanager) will pay the extra license for that.

[Raj D.]

Hi Shiv LVM and VxVM ,

But LVM is used widely , and its HP Propritary ,Disk/Volume Management sw.

hp-ux 11i comes with few vxvm features bundled. And the commands can be found on /opt/VRTS/bin.



Cheers,
Raj.

[Thayanidhi]

Hi,
More than 90% of hp-ux are runnning LVM!

Regds
TT

[Bill Hassell]

Actually, LVM was based on the IBM LVM product. Veritas developed a different volume manager (VxVM) which is unrelated to the filesystem (VxFS). A volume manager essentially manages disk space and features like mirroring and striping and data volumes. A filesystem can be added to a data volume or the volume might be raw access such as swap space.

[Devender Khatana]

Hi,

LVM no doubt is the widely used as it is incorporated into OS. More HP administrators have hands on practice on it. It is simple and stable.

Alltough HP might bring VxVm also incoporated into OS very soon but still LVM functinality can not be removed from HPUx and will be available.

HTH,
Devender

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Shiva,

LVM and VxVM are the two products used for volume management. LVM is a free product with the core OS. apart from that one more product which acts as a part of LVM called Online JFS is available which is a priced product.

Attached a good doc on the same which will be useful for you to have a deeper understanding.

Regards,
Syam

[Ammar_4]

The following terms are used when working with Logical Volume Manager. They are only some of the terminology associated with Logical Volume Manager, but they are enough for you to get started with Logical Volume Manager. It is a good idea to read the following brief overview of these terms.

Volume
A volume is a device used for a filesystem, swap, or raw data. Without Logical Volume Manager, a volume would be either a disk partition or an entire disk drive.

Physical Volume

A physical volume is a disk that has been not been initialized for use by Logical Volume Manager. An entire disk must be initialized if it is to be used by Logical Volume Manager; that is, you can't initialize only part of a disk for Logical Volume Manager use and the rest for fixed partitioning.

Volume Group
A volume group is a collection of logical volumes that are managed by Logical Volume Manager. You would typically define which disks on your system are going to be used by Logical Volume Manager and then define how you wish to group these into volume groups. Each individual disk may be a volume group, or more than one disk may form a volume group. At this point, you have created a pool of disk space called a volume group. A disk can belong to only one volume group. A volume group may span multiple physical disks.

Logical Volume
This is space that is defined within a volume group. A volume group is divided up into logical volumes. This is like a disk partition, which is of a fixed size, but you have the flexibility to change its size. A logical volume is contained within a volume group, but the volume group may span multiple physical disks. You can have a logical volume that is bigger than a single disk.

Physical Extent
A physical extent is a set of contiguous disk blocks on a physical volume. If you define a disk to be a physical volume, then the contiguous blocks within that disk form a physical extent. Logical Volume Manager uses the physical extent as the unit for allocating disk space to logical volumes. If you use a small physical extent size, such as 1 MByte, then you have a fine granularity for defining logical volumes. If you use a large physical extent size such as 256 MBytes, then you have a coarse granularity for defining logical volumes. The default size is 4 MBytes.

Logical Extents
A logical volume is a set of logical extents. Logical extents and physical extents are the same size within a volume group. Although logical and physical extents are the same size, this doesn't mean that two logical extents will map to two contiguous physical extents. It may be that you have two logical extents that end up being mapped to physical extents on different disks!