Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 Advanced Features Administrator"s Guide (5900-1503, April 2011)

Multi-volume file systems

This chapter includes the following topics:

■ About multi-volume support

■ About volume types

■ Features implemented using multi-volume support

■ Creating multi-volume file systems

■ Converting a single volume file system to a multi-volume file system

■ Adding a volume to and removing a volume from a multi-volume file system

■ Volume encapsulation

■ Reporting file extents

■ Load balancing

■ Converting a multi-volume file system to a single volume file system

About multi-volume support

VxFS provides support for multi-volume file systems when used in conjunction

with the Veritas Volume Manager. Using multi-volume support (MVS), a single

file system can be created over multiple volumes, each volume having its own

properties. For example, it is possible to place metadata on mirrored storage while

placing file data on better-performing volume types such as RAID-1+0 (striped

and mirrored). The volume must be in the same disk group as the volume set, and

it cannot already be a member of another volume set.

The MVS feature also allows file systems to reside on different classes of devices,

so that a file system can be supported from both inexpensive disks and from

Chapter