Wednesday, 8 April 2015

Understanding Veritas Volume Manager

VxVM:

VxVM is a storage management subsystem that allows to manage physical disks as logical devices called volumes.
Provides easy-to-use online disk storage management for computing environments and SAN environments.
VxVM volumes can span multiple disks.
Provides tools to improve performance and ensure data availability and integrity.
VxVM and the Operating System:
Operates as a subsystem between OS and data management systems
VxVM depends on OS for the following:
            OS disk devices
            Device handles
            VxVM dynamic multipathing (DMP) Metadevice
VxVM relies on the following daemons:
vxconfigd: Configuration daemon maintains disk and group configurations and communicates configuration changes to the kernel.
vxiod: VxVM I/O daemon provides extended I/O operations.
vxrelocd: The hot-relocation daemon monitors VxVM for events that affect redundancy, and performs hot-relocation to restore redundancy.
VxVM Storage Management:
VxVM uses two types of objects to handle storage management.
Physical objects:
Basic storage device where the data is ultimately stored
Device names – c#t#d#s#
Virtual objects:
When one or more physical disks are brought under the control of VxVM, it creates virtual objects called “volumes”.
Virtual Objects in VxVM:
VM Disks
Disk Groups
Sub disks
Plexes
Volumes

VM Disks:
When a physical disk is placed under VxVM control, a VM disk is assigned to the physical disk.
VM disk typically includes a public region (allocated storage) and a private region where internal configuration information is stored.
VM disk has a unique name (disk media name, can be maximum 31 characters, by default takes disk## format).
Disk Groups:
Is a collection of VM disks that share a common configuration.
The default disk group is “rootdg”.
Disk group name can e max 31 characters.
Allows to group disks into logical collections.
Volumes are created within a disk group.
Subdisks:
Is a set of contiguous disk blocks.
A VM disk can be divided into one or more subdisks.
Default name for VM disk is disk## (disk01) and default name for subdisk is disk##-## (disk01-01).
Any VM disk space that is not part of a subdisk is free space and can be used for creating new subdisks.
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.
Volumes:
Is a virtual disk device that appears to applications.
Consists of one or more plexes.
Default naming convention for a volume is vol## and default naming convention for plexes in a volume is vol##-##.
Volume can contain upto 31 characters.
Can consist of up to 32 plexes.
Must have at least one plex associated.
All subdisk within a volume must belong to the same disk group.

Combining Virtual objects in VxVM:
VM disks are grouped in to sub disk groups.
Subdisks are combined to form plexes.
Volumes are composed of one or more plexes.

Volume Layouts in VxVM:




Non-layered Volumes:
Sub disk is restricted to mapping directly to a VM disk.
Layered Volumes:
Is constructed by mapping its subdisks to underlying volumes.

Layout Methods:
Concatenation and Spanning
Striping (RAID 0)
Mirroring (RAID 1)
Striping + Mirroring (Mirrored Stripe or RAID 0+1)
Mirroring + Striping (Striped Mirror or RAID 1+0)
RAID 5 (striping with Parity)
Online Relayout:
Online relayout allows to change the storage layouts that have been created already without disturbing data access.

Dirty Region Logging (DRL):
DRL is enabled, speeds recovery of mirrored volumes after a system crash.
DRL keeps track of the regions that have changed due to I/O writes to a mirrored volume.
DRL uses this information to recover only those portions of the volumes that needed to be recovered.

Fast Resync:
Performs quick and efficient resynchronization of stale mirrors (a mirror that is not synchronized).
Hot-Relocation:

Feature that allows a system to react automatically to I/O failures on redundant objects in VxVM and restore redundancy and access to those objects.

No comments:

Post a Comment