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Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Getting Started With Solaris Volume Manager

2.  Storage Management Concepts

Introduction to Storage Management

Storage Hardware

RAID Levels

Configuration Planning Guidelines

Choosing Storage

General Performance Guidelines

Random I/O and Sequential I/O Optimization

Random I/O

Sequential Access I/O

3.  Solaris Volume Manager Overview

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

Configuration Planning Guidelines

When you are planning your storage management configuration, keep in mind that for any given configuration, there are trade-offs in performance, availability, and hardware costs. You might need to experiment with the different variables to determine what works best for your configuration.

This section provides guidelines for working with the following types of volumes:

Choosing Storage

Before you implement your storage management approach, you need to decide what kinds of storage devices to use. This set of guidelines compares the various types of storage to help you choose. Additional sets of guidelines apply to specific types of storage as implemented in Solaris Volume Manager. See specific chapters about each volume type for details.


Note - The types of storage that are listed here are not mutually exclusive. You can use these volumes in combination to meet multiple goals. For example, you could first create a RAID-1 volume for redundancy. Next, you could create soft partitions on that RAID-1 volume to increase the possible number of discrete file systems.


The following table provides a comparison between the features available for each type of storage.

Table 2-1 Comparison of Types of Storage

Requirements
RAID-0 (Concatenation)
RAID-0 (Stripe)
RAID-1 (Mirror)
RAID-5
Soft Partitions
Redundant data
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
Improved read performance
No
Yes
Depends on underlying device
Yes
No
Improved write performance
No
Yes
No
No
No
More than 8 slices per device
No
No
No
No
Yes
Larger available storage space
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
No

The following table outlines the trade-offs in write operations, random reads, and hardware costs between RAID-1 and RAID–5 volumes.

Table 2-2 Optimizing Redundant Storage

RAID-1 (Mirror)
RAID-5
Write operations
Faster
Slower
Random read
Faster
Slower
Hardware cost
Higher
Lower

The following list summarizes the information outlined in the tables:


Note - In addition to these generic storage options, see Hot Spare Pools for more information about using Solaris Volume Manager to support redundant devices.