Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
provides a summary of these components that are described in more detail in
the next sections of this chapter.
Table 14.2
Solaris Volume Manager Components
Component
Description
Volumes
A collection of physical disk slices or partitions that are managed as
a single logical device.
State Database
A database used to store information on the SVM configuration.
Replicas of the database are used to provide redundancy.
Hot Spare Pool
A collection of slices that can be used as hot spares to automatically
replace failed slices.
Disk Set
A set of volumes and hot spares that can be shared by several host
systems.
Volumes
SVM uses virtual disks, called volumes (previously referred to as metadevices ),
to manage the physical disks. A volume is a collection of one or more phys-
ical disk slices or partitions that appear and can be treated as a single logical
device. The basic disk management commands, except the format command,
can be used with volumes. In general, volumes can be thought of as slices or
partitions.
Like the standard Solaris file systems that are accessible using raw ( /dev/rdsk ) and
block ( /dev/dsk ) logical device names, volumes under SVM are accessed using
either the raw or the block device name under /dev/md/rdsk or /dev/md/dsk . The
volume (that is, the partition name) begins with the letter ā€œdā€ followed by a number.
For example, /dev/md/dsk/d0 is block volume d0 .
Because a volume can include slices from more than one physical disk, it can
be used to create a file system that is larger than the largest available physi-
cal disk. Volumes can include IPI, SCSI, and SPARCStorage Array drives.
Disk slices that are too small to be of any use can be combined to create
usable storage.
SVM supports five classes of volumes. These are listed in Table 14.3.
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