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

Note: The first storage pool that is defined within a disk group is referred to as a
data storage pool. All other storage pools that are subsequently defined within
the same disk group are referred to as clone storage pools. A clone storage pool
is intended to ensure that volume snapshots can be isolated from their parent
volumes for independent processing. Release 5.0 of VxVM introduces linked
snapshot volumes that can be created in a completely separate disk group from
their parent volumes. This removes the need for creating clone storage pools at
all.
Each storage pool has an associated AutoGrow policy that determines whether
disks are pulled into the pool from the disk group automatically as required (the
default behavior), or must be assigned to the pool manually.
A storage pool’s SelfSufficient policy determines whether new volumes can
only be created using those templates that are currently associated with the
storage pool, or to allow templates to be used that are associated with the disk
group or the host as required. For storage pools that you create explicitly by using
the vxpool command, the default policy is to allow only templates that are
currently associated with the storage pool to be used. For storage pools that you
create implicitly by specifying the -o intent option to the vxassist make
command, the default policy is to allow the use of any templates that are currently
installed on the host.
About templates, capabilities and rules
Volume templates (or templates for short) allow you to define and enforce
standards for volume provisioning in a storage pool. They allow you to reduce
human error by automatically allocating only those disks that have the appropriate
attributes, and by maintaining the properties with which a volume was created
throughout its lifetime. While this objective appears straightforward, the large
number of disk attributes and volume relationships that can be involved make
the task of achieving it appear daunting. ISP provides predefined templates and
template sets (collections of related templates) to address many common situations.
There is also an ISP definition language that allows you to extend the existing
templates, or to create new templates and template sets.
Each template defines a specific set of capabilities for a volume that can be created
using the template. A capability may also have parameters that you can specify
to override the default values. For example, the DataMirroring capability creates
a volume with 2 mirrors by default, and has a parameter, nmirs, that you can use
to specify a different number of mirrors.
Introduction to ISP
Basic concepts in ISP
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