VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 User's Guide - VERITAS Enterprise Administrator (September 2004)

Volume Tasks
VxVM Volumes
Chapter 4 105
VxVM Volumes
VxVM uses logical volumes to organize and manage disk space. A volume
is made up of portions of one or more physical disks, so it does not have
the physical limitations of a physical disk.
A volume can provide greater capacity and better availability and
performance than a single physical disk. A volume can be extended
(grown) across multiple disks to increase capacity, mirrored (copied) on
another disk to provide data redundancy, and/or striped across multiple
disks to improve I/O performance.
You can use VxVM to create the following types of volumes:
• Concatenated Volume
A concatenated volume is made up of one or more disk regions that
are linked together (concatenated) in a linear fashion. A
concatenated volume can consist of disk regions on multiple disks; a
concatenated volume that extends across two or more disks is also
known as a spanned volume.
NOTE Data in this type of volume cannot be recovered if the underlying
disk fails. However, a concatenated volume can be mirrored (copied)
onto other disks to protect its data against disk failure.
• Striped Volume
Striped volume data is interleaved (striped) across two or more
physical disks. Striped volume data is spread across the disks
alternately and evenly in small, equal-sized portions of data called
stripe units. Striping improves performance.
NOTE Data in this type of volume cannot be recovered if one of the
underlying disks fails. However, a striped volume can be mirrored
(copied) onto other disks to protect its data against disk failure.
• RAID-5 Volume