Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0 Solutions Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

8 Introduction to ISP
Basic concepts in ISP
Basic concepts in ISP
Provisioning storage so that it can be used by applications involves:
■ Configuring the physical storage devices (disks and derived logical units).
■ Ensuring that the appropriate hosts can access the devices.
■ Aggregating the available storage capacity into virtual storage devices
known as volumes.
■ Providing a method for applications to store and retrieve data on the
volumes, such as through a file system or a database.
ISP is concerned with step 3, and the establishment and enforcement of
installation-defined standards on the volumes that are created by aggregating
capacity from one or more disks within a disk group.
A volume appears as a disk device to host software, but one with enhanced
availability, performance, and flexibility that enables simplified management
across heterogeneous environments.
ISP builds upon the existing volume management capabilities that are provided
by Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), so the first step is to create a disk group
that contains disks which have been initialized for use with VxVM. You can use
the
vxdiskadm command or the graphical user interface to set up one or more
disk groups that contain suitably-initialized disks.
Note: A logical unit (LUN) is a storage device such as a disk, or a collection of
disks that are abstracted as a single entity by the disk array hardware (usually
after applying a RAID configuration such as RAID-0 (striping), RAID-1
(mirroring) or RAID-5 (striping with parity) to the disks). The Device Discovery
Layer (DDL) of Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) discovers LUNs and gathers
details on how they are implemented. ISP can use this information to assist you
in configuring application volumes. Unless the hardware-derived
characteristics of a LUN are important to the discussion, such devices are
referred to as disks in this book.
About storage pools
Figure 1-1 illustrates a traditional disk group containing disks that have been
initialized for VxVM use. You can create volumes from the disks in this disk
group by using the
vxassist command or the graphical user interface.