1. Concepts Guide
  2. Block Volume Storage Overview
  3. Block Volume Groups

Block Volume Groups

The Block Volume service enables you to group multiple volumes in a volume group.

A volume group can include both types of volumes:

  • Boot Volumes: The system disks for compute instances

  • Block Volumes: Volumes for data storage

You can use volume groups to create volume group backups and clones that are point-in-time and crash-consistent.

This simplifies the process to create time-consistent backups of running enterprise applications that span multiple storage volumes across multiple compute instances. You can then restore an entire group of volumes from a volume group backup.

Note:

You can also clone an entire volume group in a time-consistent and crash-consistent manner. A deep disk-to-disk and fully isolated clone of a volume group, with all the volumes associated in it, becomes available for use within a matter of seconds. This action speeds up the process of creating environments for development, quality assurance, user acceptance testing, and troubleshooting.

This capability is available using the Compute Web UI, CLI, or API.

Volume groups and volume group backups are high-level constructs that allow you to group multiple volumes. When working with volume groups and volume group backups, keep the following points in mind:

  • You can only add a volume to a volume group when the volume status is available.

  • You can add up to 32 volumes in a volume group. The maximum Block Volumes aggregated size is 100 TB.

  • Each volume can only be in one volume group.

  • When you clone a volume group, a new group with new volumes are created. For example, if you clone a volume group containing three volumes, after this operation is complete, you have two separate volume groups and six different volumes with nothing shared between the volume groups.

  • When you update a volume group using the CLI or API, you need to specify all the volumes to include in the volume group each time you use the update operation. If you do not include a volume ID in the update call, that volume is removed from the volume group.

  • When you delete a volume group, the individual volumes in the group are not deleted, only the volume group is deleted.

  • When you delete a volume that is part of a volume group, you must first remove it from the volume group before you can delete it.

  • When you delete a volume group backup, all the volume backups in the volume group backup are deleted.