Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Administrator's Guide (September 2006)

29Understanding Veritas Volume Manager
How VxVM handles storage management
Figure 1-8 Example of three subdisks assigned to one VM Disk
Any VM disk space that is not part of a subdisk is free space. You can use free space to
create new subdisks.
VxVM release 3.0 or higher supports the concept of layered volumes in which subdisks
can contain volumes. For more information, see “Layered volumes” on page 47.
Plexes
VxVM uses subdisks to build virtual objects called plexes. A plex consists of one or more
subdisks located on one or more physical disks. For example, see the plex vol01-01
shown in Figure 1-9.
Figure 1-9 Example of a plex with two subdisks
You can organize data on subdisks to form a plex by using the following methods:
■ concatenation
VM disk with three subdisks
disk01
disk01-01
disk01-02
disk01-03
Subdisksdisk01-01 disk01-02 disk01-03
vol01-01
Plex with two subdisks
Subdisks
disk01-01 disk01-02
disk01-01 disk01-02