Solaris Volume Manager provides storage management tools. These tools enable you to create and manage RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5 volumes, as well as transactional (logging) devices and soft partitions. Solaris Volume Manager provides all of the capabilities of Solstice DiskSuiteTM. Solaris Volume Manager adds the following:
Soft partitions – Allow numerous partitions on a single drive, thus breaking the 8-slice barrier.
Device ID support – Preserves the configuration of the Solaris Volume Manager. When you move or rearrange disks, the configuration is still preserved.
Active monitoring of disks – Detects silent failures.
Solaris Management Console based interface – Enables you to manage the enhanced storage devices through the same management interface that is used for other Solaris management tasks.
The WBEM application programming interface (API) for Solaris Volume Manager – Enables standards-based management of Solaris Volume Manager from any compliant tool.
The Solaris 9 release seamlessly supports the upgrade of existing systems that run Solstice DiskSuite (SDS) to the Solaris Volume Manager. This upgrade does not disturb or change the configuration. Upgrades of mirrored root file systems are fully and automatically supported.
For more information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.