Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0.1 Administrators Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, November 2009

Support for ISP in the vxassist command
You can use the vxassist command to create and administer ISP volumes. The
vxassist command now accepts the same specification of templates, capabilities
and rules as the vxvoladm command, and a set of vxassist storage specification
attributes are automatically translated into equivalent ISP rules.
If the -o intent option is specified, vxassist creates an ISP volume, and it also
sets up a storage pool in the disk group if one does not already exist. If a storage
pool already exists in a disk group, the vxassist command attempts to create an
ISP volume unless you specify the -o nointent option.
Operations for ISP that use the vxassist command have an equivalent vxvoladm
command, which is obtained by substituting vxvoladm for vxassist. Any other
arguments to the command remain the same. A vxvoladm command is shown if
there is no equivalent vxassist command.
Summary of the benefits of using ISP
The following list summarizes the main benefits that Veritas ISP provides over
the existing storage allocation features in vxassist:
■ Storage is automatically allocated based on abstract requirements such as the
desired capabilities of a volume.
■ Prefabricated capabilities that are provided by vendor-specific features of
intelligent storage arrays can be encoded as storage attributes, and used to
allocate storage.
■ Volumes can be created or grown in batch mode safe in the knowledge that
ISP will balance the requirements of all volumes.
■ All ISP operations preserve the original intent of the volumes. There is no
possibility that operations such as grow, evacuate, mirror, or add column can
accidentally degrade the reliability or performance capabilities of a volume.
■ ISP is SAN-aware and understands SAN attributes. It is also capable of using
VAIL to learn the capabilities of LUNs.
■ Disk tags, administered using the vxdisk command or the VEA graphical user
interface, allow you to define attributes for LUNs that lie outside their
discovered hardware characteristics, and to assign values to these attributes.
Limitations of ISP
The following features of vxassist are not currently supported for ISP volumes:
21Understanding ISP
The benefits of ISP