VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide

Creating and Administering Storage Pools

VERITAS Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP) allows you to group storage with similar

characteristics for creating volumes. A storage pool is a named collection of volumes and the LUNs

with which they are associated.

The storage policies and rules that are associated with a storage pool determine its characteristics.

Each storage pool represents a collection of volumes that are created according to these policies

and rules. For example, a pool may be configured to allow allocation of LUNs from outside the

pool, and to use only templates that are associated with the pool by specifying the appropriate

autogrow and selfsufficient policies.

For more information on the rules that are supported for storage pools, refer to “Rules” on

page 121.

This chapter describes how to use the vxpool utility to create and administer storage pools. For

full information about this command, see the vxpool(1M) manual page.

Reserving and Unreserving Disks for Use with ISP

When you initialize a disk for use with VxVM, for example, by running the vxdiskadm

command, both ISP and non-ISP utilities have access to the space on the disk. You can reserve a

disk for use with either set of utilities by setting the values of the allocator_reserved and

allocator_nouse flags for the disk.

To reserve disks for exclusive use with ISP, and prevent non-ISP utilities such as vxassist from

using these disks, select the menu item 22 Mark a disk as ISP-reserved for a

disk group from the main menu of the vxdiskadm command. Alternatively, you can use the

following command to reserve a disk specified by its disk media name for use with ISP:

# vxedit [-g diskgroup] set "allocator_reserved=on" diskname

Note A disk that is to be reserved for ISP must not contain any existing VxVM subdisks.

To remove the reservation flag from disks, select menu item 23 Turn off the

allocator-reserved flag on a disk from the main menu of the vxdiskadm

command. Alternatively, you can use the following command to remove ISP reservation from a

disk specified by its disk media name: