VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 Administrator's Guide

Introduction to Volume Manager
Introduction
Chapter 126
Introduction
This chapter describes what VERITAS Volume Manager is, how it works,
how you can communicate with it through the user interfaces, and
Volume Manager concepts. Related documents that provide specific
information about Volume Manager are listed in the Preface.
The following topics are covered in this chapter:
• “How Data is Stored”
• “Volume Manager Overview”
• “Physical Objects”
• “Volumes and Virtual Objects”
• “Virtual Object Data Organization (Volume Layouts)”
• “Volume Manager and RAID-5”
• “Layered Volumes”
• “Volume Manager User Interfaces”
• “Volume Manager Conceptual Overview”
• “Volume Administration Tasks”
Volume Manager provides easy-to-use online disk storage
management for computing environments. Traditional disk storage
management often requires that machines be taken off-line at a
major inconvenience to users. In the distributed client/server
environment, databases and other resources must maintain high
availability, be easy to access, and be Volume Manager provides the
tools to improve performance and ensure data availability and
integrity. Volume Manager also dynamically configures disk
storage while the system is active .
This chapter introduces the VERITAS Volume Manager concepts and
describes the tools that Volume Manager uses to perform storage
management.
NOTE Rootability or bringing the root disk under VxVM control is not
supported on HP-UX 11i systems, but it is supported on HP-UX 11i