Solaris Volume Management - Introduction

Solaris' Volume Management permits the creation of 5 object types:
1. Volumes(RAID 0(concatenation or stripe)/1(mirroring)/5(striping with parity)
2. Soft partitions - permits the creation of very large storage devices
3. Hot spare pools - facilitates provisioning of spare storage for use when RAID-1/5 volume has failed
i.e. MIRROR
-DISK1
-DISK2
-DISK3 - spare

4. State database replica - MUST be created prior to volumes
- Contains configuration & status of ALL managed objects (volumes/hot spare pools/Soft partitions/etc.)

5. Disk sets - used when clustering Solaris in failover mode

Note: Volume Management facilitates the creation of virtual disks
Note: Virtual disks are accessible via: /dev/md/dsk & /dev/md/rdsk
Rules regarding Volumes:
1. State database replicas are required
2. Volumes can be created using dedicated slices
3. Volumes can be created on slices with state database replicas
4. Volumes created by volume manager CANNOT be managed using 'format', however, can be managed using CLI-tools (metadb, metainit) and GUI tool (SMC)
5. You may use tools such as 'mkfs', 'newfs', 'growfs'
6. You may grow volumes using 'growfs'