Consider the following logical storage elements before you decide how to distribute data across the available physical storage and map it to data hosts:
- Storage pools are collections of volumes that share a profile. The profiles defines the common configuration of the volumes.
- Virtual disks, also called redundant array of independent disks (RAID) sets, are a collection of locations in the memory of more than one physical disk. The storage array handles a virtual disk as if it were an actual disk. You create the virtual disks during volume creation.
- Volumes are divisions of a pool, consisting of virtual disks, and are accessed by hosts and host groups.
- Snapshots are copies of the data in a volume at a specific moment. Snapshots can be made without interruption of the normal operation of the system.