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

The remainder of this chapter introduces some basic but essential ISP concepts

and terminology. Subsequent chapters apply these concepts to implement various

storage provisioning scenarios. More detailed explanations on topics in this chapter

are available.

See the Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator’s

Guide.

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.

Introduction to ISP

Basic concepts in ISP