HP-UX 11i Version 2 Release Notes (October 2003)

Disk and File Management
VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) 3.5
Chapter 5
119
— vxfs_ra_per_disk
— vx_max_ra_kbytes
•The labelit (1M) command is obsolete starting this release.
VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) 3.5
Volume Manager (VxVM) is a storage management subsystem that allows you to
manage physical disks as logical devices called volumes. (A volume is a logical device
that appears to data management systems as a physical disk.) VxVM overcomes physical
restrictions imposed by hardware disk devices by providing a logical volume
management layer. This allows volumes to span multiple disks.
With Ignite-UX installed, VxVM offers “rootability”: you can select at installation time to
have your root disk managed by VxVM.
Summary of Change
VxVM 3.5 includes the following new features:
• VERITAS Cluster Volume Manager 3.5 for HP-UX (CVM) [B9117AA] - This product
is purchased separately and provides enhanced volume management features for a
clustered environment. It is integrated with MC/ServiceGuard and ServiceGuard
OPS Edition and can be used only when version A.11.14.02 of either of those
products has been installed first.
• Device Discovery Layer - This feature allows for the dynamic addition of new disk
arrays without the need for a kernel rebuild and system reboot.
• SIG Licensing Product - This replaces the old ELM licensing product used for
previous VxVM releases.
• VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (VEA) - This replaces the previous VMSA
product used for previous VxVM releases.
Impact
VxVM 3.5 offers significant enhancements over the previous Itanium-based VxVM 3.1
release, which speed transactions, reduce processing time, and improve bandwidth
usage. These improvements do not require special tuning and are particularly noticeable
in large configurations.
• The maximum size of a private region has been doubled; this allows large sites to
create more volume manager objects in a disk group, and is particularly useful for
users who use layered volumes.
• Object creation time (especially with vxassist) has been reduced dramatically for
configurations over approximately 5,000 objects. Volume creation time remains
nearly constant up to and beyond 50,000 objects.