Installation Guide

Volume Layouts in VxVM
A volume layout is defined by the association of a volume to one or more plexes, each of which
maps to a subdisk. VxVM supports two different types of volume layout:
• Non-Layered
• Layered
Non-Layered
In a non-layered volume layout, a subdisk maps directly to a VM disk. This enables the subdisk to
define a contiguous extent of storage space backed by the public region of a VM disk.
Layered Volumes
A layered volume is constructed by mapping its subdisks to the underlying volumes. The subdisks
in the underlying volumes must map to VM disks, and hence to the attached physical storage.
VxVM Storage Layouts
Data in virtual objects is organized to create volumes by using the following layouts:
• Concatenation and Spanning
• Striping (RAID-0)
• Mirroring (RAID-1)
• Striping Plus Mirroring (Mirrored-Stripe or RAID-0+1)
• Mirroring Plus Striping (Striped-Mirror, RAID-1+0 or RAID-10)
• RAID-5 (Striping with Parity)
Concatenation and Spanning
Concatenation maps data in a linear manner onto one or more subdisks in a plex. To access the
data in a concatenated plex sequentially, data is first accessed from the first subdisk from beginning
to end and then accessed in the remaining subdisks sequentially from beginning to end, until the
end of the last subdisk.
Striping (RAID-0)
Striping maps data so that the data is interleaved among two or more physical disks. A striped
plex contains two or more subdisks, spread out over two or more physical disks.
Mirroring (RAID-1)
Mirroring uses multiple mirrors (plexes) to duplicate the information contained in a volume. In the
event of a physical disk failure, the plex on the failed disk becomes unavailable.
When striping or spanning across a large number of disks, failure of any one of the disks can
make the entire plex unusable. As disks can fail, you must consider mirroring to improve the
reliability (and availability) of a striped or spanned volume.
Striping Plus Mirroring (Mirrored-Stripe or RAID-0+1)
VxVM supports combination of mirroring above striping. This combined layout is called a
mirrored-stripe layout. A mirrored-stripe layout offers the dual benefits of striping to spread data
across multiple disks, while mirroring provides redundancy of data.
Mirroring Plus Striping (Striped-Mirror, RAID-1+0 or RAID-10)
VxVM supports the combination of striping above mirroring. This combined layout is called a
striped-mirror layout. Putting mirroring below striping, mirrors each column of the stripe. If there
are multiple subdisks per column, each subdisk can be mirrored individually instead of each column.
16 Introduction