Volume Managers

Sun Cluster supports the volume managers Solstice DiskSuite and VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM). These volume managers provide mirroring, concatenating, and striping for use by Sun Cluster. Volume managers organize disks into disk groups (VxVM) or disksets (Solstice DiskSuite) that can then be administered as a unit.

The Sun StorEdge A3x00 disk expansion unit also has the capability of mirroring, concatenating, and striping--all within the Sun StorEdge A3x00 hardware. See your Sun StorEdge A3x00 documentation for details.

You can use Solstice DiskSuite and VERITAS Volume Manager together only if you use Solstice DiskSuite to manage the local disks and VERITAS Volume Manager to control the multihost disks. In such a configuration, plan your physical disk needs accordingly. You might need additional disks to use for the VERITAS Volume Manager root disk group, for example. See your volume manager documentation for more information.

For more information about your particular volume manager, see your volume manager documentation and "Volume Management".

Disk Groups and Disksets

Disk groups (VxVM terminology) and disksets (Solstice DiskSuite terminology) are sets of disks under the control of a volume manager. The volume manager can be used to support RAID-0, RAID-1, or RAID-5 configurations of shared disks.

All data service and parallel database data is stored in disk groups or disksets on the shared disks. Mirrors within disk groups or disksets are generally organized such that each half of a mirror is physically located within a separate disk expansion unit and connected to a separate controller or host adapter. This eliminates a single disk or disk expansion unit as a single point of failure.

Disk groups or disksets may be used for raw data storage, file systems, or both.