Storage Foundation 7.4.1 Administrator's Guide - Linux
- Section I. Introducing Storage Foundation
- Overview of Storage Foundation
- How Dynamic Multi-Pathing works
- How Veritas Volume Manager works
- How Veritas Volume Manager works with the operating system
- How Veritas Volume Manager handles storage management
- Volume layouts in Veritas Volume Manager
- Online relayout
- Volume resynchronization
- Dirty region logging
- Volume snapshots
- FastResync
- How VxVM handles hardware clones or snapshots
- Volume encryption
- How Veritas File System works
- Section II. Provisioning storage
- Provisioning new storage
- Advanced allocation methods for configuring storage
- Customizing allocation behavior
- Using rules to make volume allocation more efficient
- Understanding persistent attributes
- Customizing disk classes for allocation
- Specifying allocation constraints for vxassist operations with the use clause and the require clause
- Creating volumes of a specific layout
- Customizing allocation behavior
- Creating and mounting VxFS file systems
- Creating a VxFS file system
- Mounting a VxFS file system
- tmplog mount option
- ioerror mount option
- largefiles and nolargefiles mount options
- Resizing a file system
- Monitoring free space
- Extent attributes
- Section III. Administering multi-pathing with DMP
- Administering Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
- About discovering disks and dynamically adding disk arrays
- How to administer the Device Discovery Layer
- Administering DMP using the vxdmpadm utility
- Gathering and displaying I/O statistics
- Specifying the I/O policy
- Discovering and configuring newly added disk devices
- Dynamic Reconfiguration of devices
- Reconfiguring a LUN online that is under DMP control using the Dynamic Reconfiguration tool
- Manually reconfiguring a LUN online that is under DMP control
- Managing devices
- Displaying disk information
- Changing the disk device naming scheme
- Adding and removing disks
- Event monitoring
- Administering Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- Section IV. Administering Storage Foundation
- Administering sites and remote mirrors
- About sites and remote mirrors
- Fire drill - testing the configuration
- Changing the site name
- Administering the Remote Mirror configuration
- Failure and recovery scenarios
- Administering sites and remote mirrors
- Section V. Optimizing I/O performance
- Veritas File System I/O
- Veritas Volume Manager I/O
- Managing application I/O workloads using maximum IOPS settings
- Section VI. Using Point-in-time copies
- Understanding point-in-time copy methods
- When to use point-in-time copies
- About Storage Foundation point-in-time copy technologies
- Volume-level snapshots
- Storage Checkpoints
- About FileSnaps
- About snapshot file systems
- Administering volume snapshots
- Traditional third-mirror break-off snapshots
- Full-sized instant snapshots
- Creating instant snapshots
- Adding an instant snap DCO and DCO volume
- Controlling instant snapshot synchronization
- Creating instant snapshots
- Cascaded snapshots
- Adding a version 0 DCO and DCO volume
- Administering Storage Checkpoints
- Storage Checkpoint administration
- Administering FileSnaps
- Administering snapshot file systems
- Understanding point-in-time copy methods
- Section VII. Optimizing storage with Storage Foundation
- Understanding storage optimization solutions in Storage Foundation
- Migrating data from thick storage to thin storage
- Maintaining Thin Storage with Thin Reclamation
- Reclamation of storage on thin reclamation arrays
- Identifying thin and thin reclamation LUNs
- Veritas InfoScale 4k sector device support solution
- Section VIII. Maximizing storage utilization
- Understanding storage tiering with SmartTier
- Creating and administering volume sets
- Multi-volume file systems
- Features implemented using multi-volume file system (MVFS) support
- Adding a volume to and removing a volume from a multi-volume file system
- Volume encapsulation
- Load balancing
- Administering SmartTier
- About SmartTier
- Placement classes
- Administering placement policies
- File placement policy rules
- Multiple criteria in file placement policy rule statements
- Using SmartTier with solid state disks
- Sub-file relocation
- Administering hot-relocation
- How hot-relocation works
- Moving relocated subdisks
- Deduplicating data
- Compressing files
- About compressing files
- Use cases for compressing files
- Section IX. Administering storage
- Managing volumes and disk groups
- Rules for determining the default disk group
- Moving volumes or disks
- Monitoring and controlling tasks
- Performing online relayout
- Adding a mirror to a volume
- Managing disk groups
- Disk group versions
- Displaying disk group information
- Importing a disk group
- Moving disk groups between systems
- Importing a disk group containing hardware cloned disks
- Handling conflicting configuration copies
- Destroying a disk group
- Backing up and restoring disk group configuration data
- Managing plexes and subdisks
- Decommissioning storage
- Rootability
- Encapsulating a disk
- Rootability
- Sample supported root disk layouts for encapsulation
- Encapsulating and mirroring the root disk
- Administering an encapsulated boot disk
- Quotas
- Using Veritas File System quotas
- File Change Log
- Managing volumes and disk groups
- Section X. Reference
- Appendix A. Reverse path name lookup
- Appendix B. Tunable parameters
- Tuning the VxFS file system
- Methods to change Dynamic Multi-Pathing tunable parameters
- Tunable parameters for VxVM
- Methods to change Veritas Volume Manager tunable parameters
- Appendix C. Command reference
Boot-time volume restrictions
Volumes on the root disk differ from other volumes in that they have very specific restrictions on their configuration:
The root volume (rootvol) must exist in the default disk group, bootdg. Although other volumes named rootvol can be created in disk groups other than bootdg, only the volume rootvol in bootdg can be used to boot the system.
The rootvol and swapvol volumes always have minor device numbers 0 and 1 respectively. Other volumes on the root disk do not have specific minor device numbers.
Restricted mirrors of volumes on the root disk device have overlay partitions created for them. An overlay partition is one that exactly includes the disk space occupied by the restricted mirror. During boot, before the rootvol, varvol, usrvol and swapvol volumes are fully configured, the default volume configuration uses the overlay partition to access the data on the disk.
Although it is possible to add a striped mirror to a rootvol device for performance reasons, you cannot stripe the primary plex or any mirrors of rootvol that may be needed for system recovery or booting purposes if the primary plex fails.
rootvol and swapvol cannot be spanned or contain a primary plex with multiple noncontiguous subdisks. You cannot grow or shrink any volume associated with an encapsulated boot disk (rootvol, usrvol, varvol, optvol, swapvol, and so on) because these map to a physical underlying partition on the disk and must be contiguous. A workaround is to unencapsulate the boot disk, repartition the boot disk as desired (growing or shrinking partitions as needed), and then re-encapsulating.
When mirroring parts of the boot disk, the disk being mirrored to must be large enough to hold the data on the original plex, or mirroring may not work.
The volumes on the root disk cannot use dirty region logging (DRL).
In addition to these requirements, it is a good idea to have at least one contiguous, (cylinder-aligned if appropriate) mirror for each of the volumes for root, usr, var, opt and swap. This makes it easier to convert these from volumes back to regular disk partitions (during an operating system upgrade, for example).