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Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide     Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 Information Library
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Getting Started With Solaris Volume Manager

2.  Storage Management Concepts

3.  Solaris Volume Manager Overview

What's New in Solaris Volume Manager

Introduction to Solaris Volume Manager

How Solaris Volume Manager Manages Storage

How to Administer Solaris Volume Manager

How to Access the Solaris Volume Manager Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Solaris Volume Manager Requirements

Overview of Solaris Volume Manager Components

Overview of Volumes

Classes of Volumes

How Volumes Are Used

Example--Volume That Consists of Two Slices

Volume and Disk Space Expansion Using the growfs Command

Volume Names

Volume Name Guidelines

State Database and State Database Replicas

Hot Spare Pools

Disk Sets

Solaris Volume Manager Configuration Guidelines

General Guidelines

File System Guidelines

Overview of Creating Solaris Volume Manager Components

Prerequisites for Creating Solaris Volume Manager Components

Overview of Multi-Terabyte Support in Solaris Volume Manager

Large Volume Support Limitations

Using Large Volumes

Upgrading to Solaris Volume Manager

4.  Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster (Overview)

5.  Configuring and Using Solaris Volume Manager (Scenario)

6.  State Database (Overview)

7.  State Database (Tasks)

8.  RAID-0 (Stripe and Concatenation) Volumes (Overview)

9.  RAID-0 (Stripe and Concatenation) Volumes (Tasks)

10.  RAID-1 (Mirror) Volumes (Overview)

11.  RAID-1 (Mirror) Volumes (Tasks)

12.  Soft Partitions (Overview)

13.  Soft Partitions (Tasks)

14.  RAID-5 Volumes (Overview)

15.  RAID-5 Volumes (Tasks)

16.  Hot Spare Pools (Overview)

17.  Hot Spare Pools (Tasks)

18.  Disk Sets (Overview)

19.  Disk Sets (Tasks)

20.  Maintaining Solaris Volume Manager (Tasks)

21.  Best Practices for Solaris Volume Manager

22.  Top-Down Volume Creation (Overview)

23.  Top-Down Volume Creation (Tasks)

24.  Monitoring and Error Reporting (Tasks)

25.  Troubleshooting Solaris Volume Manager (Tasks)

A.  Important Solaris Volume Manager Files

B.  Solaris Volume Manager Quick Reference

C.  Solaris Volume Manager CIM/WBEM API

Index

Introduction to Solaris Volume Manager

Solaris Volume Manager is a software product that lets you manage large numbers of disks and the data on those disks. Although there are many ways to use Solaris Volume Manager, most tasks include the following:

In some instances, Solaris Volume Manager can also improve I/O performance.

For information on the types of disks supported in the Solaris operating system, see Chapter 7, Managing Disks (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

How Solaris Volume Manager Manages Storage

Solaris Volume Manager uses virtual disks to manage physical disks and their associated data. In Solaris Volume Manager, a virtual disk is called a volume. For historical reasons, some command-line utilities also refer to a volume as a metadevice.

From the perspective of an application or a file system, a volume is functionally identical to a physical disk. Solaris Volume Manager converts I/O requests directed at a volume into I/O requests to the underlying member disks.

Solaris Volume Manager volumes are built from disk slices or from other Solaris Volume Manager volumes. An easy way to build volumes is to use the graphical user interface (GUI) that is built into the Solaris Management Console. The Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console presents you with a view of all the existing volumes. By following the steps in wizards, you can easily build any kind of Solaris Volume Manager volume or component. You can also build and modify volumes by using Solaris Volume Manager command-line utilities.

For example, if you need more storage capacity as a single volume, you could use Solaris Volume Manager to make the system treat a collection of slices as one larger volume. After you create a volume from these slices, you can immediately begin using the volume just as you would use any “real” slice or device.

For a more detailed discussion of volumes, see Overview of Volumes.

Solaris Volume Manager can increase the reliability and availability of data by using RAID-1 (mirror) volumes and RAID-5 volumes. Solaris Volume Manager hot spares can provide another level of data availability for mirrors and RAID-5 volumes.

Once you have set up your configuration, you can use the Enhanced Storage tool within the Solaris Management Console to report on its operation.