Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide

Configuration Planning Guidelines

When you are planning your storage management configuration, keep in mind that for any given application 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 Solaris Volume Manager RAID 0 (concatenation and stripe) volumes, RAID 1 (mirror) volumes, RAID 5 volumes, soft partitions, transactional (logging) volumes, and file systems that are constructed on volumes.

Choosing Storage Mechanisms

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 storage mechanisms to help you choose among them. Additional sets of guidelines apply to specific storage mechanisms as implemented in Solaris Volume Manager. See specific chapters about each volume type for details.


Note –

The storage mechanisms listed are not mutually exclusive. You can use them in combination to meet multiple goals. For example, you could create a RAID 1 volume for redundancy, then create soft partitions on it to increase the number of discrete file systems that are possible.


Table 2–1 Choosing Storage Mechanisms

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/device 

No 

No 

No 

No 

Yes 

Larger available storage space 

Yes 

Yes 

No 

Yes 

No 

Table 2–2 Optimizing Redundant Storage

 

RAID 1 (Mirror) 

RAID 5 

Write operations 

Faster 

Slower 

Random read 

Faster 

Slower 

Hardware cost 

Higher 

Lower 


Note –

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