VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide

Chapter 5, Administering Instant Snapshots

Preparing Storage Pools for Full-Sized Instant Snapshots

Assuming that you have already set up a data storage pool in a disk group using the procedure

given in “Creating a Storage Pool” on page 36, you can create one or more clone storage pools in

the same disk group by using the same procedure. You may choose to use different types of disks or

templates with a clone storage pool than you set up for the data storage pool.

For example, the following commands set up a data and clone storage pool in the disk group,

ttdg, from storage pool definitions:

# vxpool -g ttdg create ttdtpool \

pooldefinition=prefab_mirrored_volumes

# vxpool -g ttdg create ttclpool pooldefinition=mirrored_volumes

The data storage pool, ttdtpool, is configured with templates that support the creation of

volumes on mirrored disks that are prefabricated in hardware. The templates that are installed for

the clone storage pool, ttclpool, support mirrored volumes that may be created using software.

Having set up the storage pools, they can be populated with initialized disks as described in

“Adding Disks to a Storage Pool” on page 39.

Several storage pool sets are provided (see “Storage Pool Sets” on page 175) for setting up data and

clone storage pools within a disk group. To set up a data and clone storage pool using one of these

defined sets, use the following command:

# vxpool [-g diskgroup] organize storage_pool_set

For example, to set up a data storage pool that supports mirrored volumes and a clone storage pool

that supports striped snapshots in the disk group, mydg, you could use this command:

# vxpool -g mydg organize mirrored_data_striped_clones

This command assigns default names for the storage pools. These names are based on the definition

names. If required you can rename these storage pools as described in “Renaming a Storage Pool”

on page 42.

Creating a Volume for Use as a Full-Sized Instant Snapshot

If you want to create a full-sized instant snapshot for an original volume, you can use an empty

volume with the required capability, and with the same length and region size as the original

volume.

To create an empty volume for use by a full-sized instant snapshot:

1. Use the vxprint command on the original volume to find the required size for the snapshot

volume.

# LEN=‘vxprint [-g diskgroup] -F%len volume‘