Re: Veritas Volume Manager vs Sun Volume Manager

From: Rodrick Brown (rbrown_at_rodrickbrown.com)
Date: 04/19/05 

Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 13:09:06 GMT

"Andy P." <not@all.valid> wrote in message
news:lNqdnT3_VdwHWPnfRVnyvw@pipex.net...
> I'm about to build a number of systems connected to a SAN. I intend to
> have two internal disks on Sun SPARC servers, and the rest of the disks
> from a SAN.
>
> I have not used Veritas Volume Manager before but have used Sun Volume
> Manager but on smaller system. Total disk storage per server will be about
> 1-3Tb. I don't have info on LUN sizes at the moment.
>
> Question is - is there any major advantage to using Veritas Volume Manager
> in this configuration over Sun Volume Manager? Is it worth the extra
> money?
>
> My thought is: mirror the internal disks for the OS. Request 100Gb (first
> number that came into my head) LUNs from an array on the SAN and use SVM
> to concatenate these into the correct size i.e. 10 disk for 1Tb, 20 for
> 2Tb etc. Since the disks on the SAN will be configured as RAID-5 or
> RAID-50, further RAID should be unnecessary???
>
> So - will SVM do the job or should I look at VxVM an why?
>
> Andy

Both SVM and VxVM can manage SAN volumes like a charm but for the past 2+
year or so i've been using SVM for internal boot disks, and using Veritas
for SAN attached storage, VxVM in combination with the slew of other Veritas
storage products does have alot of advanced features when working with SAN
attached storage not found in SVM like flashsnap (read/write mirror) ,
clustered file systems, the ability to move your storage across multiple
systems running different OS's, remote replication using VVR and the list
goes on and on.

If you have no real plan to utilize any of these advance storage features
then there is no real reason to use Veritas and SVM will work well for the
most part.

So basically it comes down to a cost vs features but SVM and VxVM are very
reliable and work very well for the most part.

- Rodrick R. Brown

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Need experiences regarding booting from SAN
    ... I have a 7026-M80 that I am using SAN boot disks on. ... The storage is a FastT700. ... Need experiences regarding booting from SAN ...
    (AIX-L)
  • Re: High Performance/High Availability SAN config.. Old Skool vs. New School Question..
    ... I find the various SAN vendors, especially the field salesweasels, only ... SAN storage, but with a few gotchas. ... Server as opposed to general file storage. ... > am pretty on top of things as far as how to configure the disks to get the ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.setup)
  • Re: Exchange 2007 mailbox storage Design
    ... While many folks feel they need the SAN to protect data, that really goes back to when the only clustering option was SCC or MSCS with that horrid single point of failure in the database. ... With CCR, there are two copies of the data, and two copies of data on tier 2 storage are always better than one copy of data on tier 1 storage. ... disks for Active n passive mailboxes.. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.design)
  • Re: Exchange 2007 mailbox storage Design
    ... While many folks feel they need the SAN to protect data, that really goes back to when the only clustering option was SCC or MSCS with that horrid single point of failure in the database. ... With CCR, there are two copies of the data, and two copies of data on tier 2 storage are always better than one copy of data on tier 1 storage. ... disks for Active n passive mailboxes.. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.design)
  • SUMMARY: SAN Storage best practice
    ... fault tolerant SAN storage is overkill. ... other host side volume management requirements that might exceed what is ... If your storage array is setup to hand out fault tolerant LUN's then it ... --I've been in an organization where double mirroring was seriously ...
    (SunManagers)