Disclaimer: I work in product management on Storage Foundation at Symantec.
Hi Jon, Without going in the details, there are a couple of high level differences that are worth calling out: 1. Multipathing (DMP) 2. Integration with the file system for advanced storage optimization (SmartMove and Thin Reclamation) 3. Scale out management (Veritas Operations Manager) VxVM comes with Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP). DMP provides enterprise grade performance and availability for the industry’s broadest set of storage HW. You can check the latest support list at: ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/Foundation_Suite/330441.pdf . All operations in DMP (as in VxVM) are online. That includes configuration operations like adding support for a new storage array. One simple and really useful thing that DMP provides are device names that are aligned with the short names used inside the storage array. It streamlines communication between the system and storage admins by making extremely easy to map devices on a server to LUNs in a backend storage array. That reduces provisioning and configuration errors. It also comes handy for troubleshooting. Are you using or planning to use Thin Provisioning? If you are, you already know that Thin Provisioning automates allocation of storage to your file systems. If you are running a thin environment, you will want it to stay thin over time. That means ensuring that ‘no longer used’ storage is automatically put back in the array free pool. The problem is that a storage array by itself cannot differentiate between ‘used’ and ‘no longer used’ storage. The host file system however can provide that information. Together with the Veritas File System (VxFS), VxVM delivers a feature called Thin Reclamation. Thin Reclamation fully automated reclaiming ‘no longer used space’ on thin luns. It works with the majority of thin storage arrays on the market. By combining array based Thin Provisioning with host triggered Thin Reclamation, you get a fully automated, always optimized thin storage ecosystem. You can get more information at: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/vision-2010-symantec-and-array-vendors-helping-customers-get-thin-and-stay-thin-0 Last but not least is scaling out management. If you have a license for Storage Foundation, you are entitled to deploy the Veritas Operations Manager (VOM). You can download it free from here: http://www.symantec.com/business/veritas-operations-manager. It’s extremely easy to deploy (we’re talking 5 minutes). You can find some good screencasts to walk you through the process at: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/new-release-veritas-operations-manager-vom-30 With VOM, you can now think of VxVM and VxFS as enabling functionality that you will consume through VOM. You get to manage storage and HA/DR from a single pane of glass. You get end to end visibility from top of application all the way down to array spindle. If you’re running a database, you get to know how much storage is actually used by tables within the db data files. Have you ever had to move an application from one storage array to another? Doing this in VOM is point and click. And it’s all online. Need to perform some maintenance in your SAN? VOM allows you to gracefully shut down all the DMP paths that go to a given array controller (checking first that doing this won’t bring anything down). Do you maintenance. Then re-enable the paths. All from a single pane of glass that allows you to always act on up to date information. Note that I haven’t talked about snapshots, fast mirror resync, portable data containers (so you can seamlessly move file systems from Unix to Linux and back), host based replication, etc. My point is that there’s much more to VxVM than host based volume management. We’re focused on bridging the gap between server and storage and automating the tricky tasks associated with provisioning and maintaining storage for applications and databases. Thomas Veritas Storage Foundation and Cluster Server Product Management From: veritas-vx-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu [mailto:veritas-vx-boun...@mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Jon Price Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2010 11:21 AM To: veritas-vx@mailman.eng.auburn.edu Cc: Jon Stanley Subject: Re: [Veritas-vx] Linux: "lvm" versus Veritas VxVM? Thanks. Very helpful! On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Doug Hughes <d...@will.to> wrote: Jon Stanley wrote: > On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Doug Hughes <d...@will.to> wrote: > > >> * in vxvm lets you do everything from raid-0 to raid-6. lvm doesn't do >> mirror. >> > > I'll make a point of contention here. From the lvcreate man page: > > -m, --mirrors Mirrors > Creates a mirrored logical volume with Mirrors > copies. For example, specifying "-m 1" would result in a mirror with > two-sides; > that is, a linear volume plus one copy. > > Ah, I'm a little behind then. I'm used to lvm where you have to do the mirroring in mdadm. Thanks for the correction. _______________________________________________ Veritas-vx maillist - Veritas-vx@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-vx
_______________________________________________ Veritas-vx maillist - Veritas-vx@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-vx
