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

Administering instant

snapshots

This chapter includes the following topics:

■ About administration of instant snapshots

■ Limitations of volume snapshots

■ Preparing storage pools for full-sized instant snapshots

■ Creating a volume for use as a full-sized instant or linked break-off snapshot

■ Creating a shared cache volume and preparing space-optimized snapshots

■ Creating instant snapshots

About administration of instant snapshots

Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) provides the capability for taking an image of

a volume at a given point in time. Such an image is referred to as a volume

snapshot.

Instant volume snapshots allow you to make backup copies of your volumes online

with minimal interruption to users. You can then use the backup copies to restore

data that has been lost due to disk failure, software errors or human mistakes, or

to create replica volumes for the purposes of report generation, application

development, or testing.

The following types of instant volume snapshots are supported for use with

application volumes created by Veritas Intelligent Storage Provisioning (ISP):

■ Full-sized instant snapshots require an empty volume to be prepared for use

as the snapshot volume. The length of this volume must be the same as that

Chapter