SUMMARY: Disk Suite / Volume Manager Question

From: Moscola, Alfred <Alfred_Moscola_at_Intuit.com>
Date: Thu Oct 25 2001 - 12:43:35 EDT
Thanks to:
John Martinez, Nathan Dietsch, Peter Duncan, Oliver Masse, Todd Fiedler,
Darren Dunham, Kevin Buterbaugh, Vipin Sharma, Karki Prabhat

The consensus was that Volume Manager was better suited to large
environments because of the functionality.  The more complex the server
(many disks, SAN attached, dynamic configuration) the better off you are
using Volume Manager.  Darren Dunham presented this list in favor of VM:

1) VxVM autoformats disks.  No need to apply your own slicing.
2) VM handles the state database automatically.  No metadb commands.
3) VM works independent of the numbering of the disks.  If the
   controller or target numbers of the disks change between boots, VM
   will still find the disks. SDS will break.
4) VM can easily "deport/import" groups of disks with no other
   information.  So you can move a tray of disks to a new machine, issue
   a "import" command and the disks are available to the machine in the
   old configuration.  
5) (big one).  Disks and disk objects are "named" in VM.  In SDS, you
   use d# for metadevices.  Keeping track of the difference between d27
   and d34 can be more difficult than if they had explicit names.

Kevin Buterbaugh and Peter Duncan have used Disk Suite exclusively and with
great success.

The two negatives cited for Volume Manager were the cost and the quality of
the documentation.

This link provides a useful (if slightly outdated) comparison of the
products:
http://www.eng.auburn.edu/pub/mail-lists/ssastuff/sdsvxvm.html 

Thank you to everyone for your fast responses.

Original Post:
Is anyone using Disk Suite on larger servers or is Veritas Volume Manager
better suited to servers with high numbers of disks to manage? I have heard
that Disk Suite's niche is servers with fewer disks or mirroring just the
root disk.  Thanks.
Received on Thu Oct 25 17:43:35 2001

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