Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Volume Manager Storage Layout

A volume's layout refers to the organization of plexes in a volume. Volume layout is the way plexes are configured to remap the volume address space through which I/O is redirected at run-time. Volume layouts are based on the concept of disk spanning, which is the ability to logically combine physical disks in order to store data across multiple disks.

A variety of volume layouts are available, and each layout has different advantages and disadvantages. The layouts that you choose depend on the levels of performance and reliability required by your system.
With Volume Manager, you can change the volume layout without disrupting applications or file systems that are using the volume. A volume layout can be configured, reconfigured, resized, and tuned while the volume remains accessible.
Common volume layouts include:
  • Concatenated
  • Striped
  • Mirrored
  • RAID-5
  • Layered

Concatenated

In a concatenated volume, subdisks are arranged both sequentially and contiguously within a plex. Concatenation allows a volume to be created from multiple regions of one or more disks if there is not enough space for an entire volume on a single region of a disk.

Striped

In a striped volume, data is spread evenly across multiple disks. Stripes are equally-sized fragments that are allocated alternately and evenly to the subdisks of a single plex. There must be at least two subdisks in a striped plex, each of which must exist on a different disk. Throughput increases with the number of disks across which a plex is striped. Striping helps to balance I/O load in cases where high traffic areas exist on certain subdisks.

Mirrored

A mirrored volume uses multiple plexes to duplicate the information contained in a volume. Although a volume can have a single plex, at least two are required for true mirroring (redundancy of data). Each of these plexes should contain disk space from different disks for the redundancy to be useful.

RAID-5

A RAID-5 volume uses striping to spread data and parity evenly across multiple disks in an array. Each stripe contains a parity stripe unit and data stripe units. Parity can be used to reconstruct data if one of the disks fails. In comparison to the performance of striped volumes, write throughput of RAID-5 volumes decreases since parity information needs to be updated each time data is accessed. However, in comparison to mirroring, the use of parity reduces the amount of space required.

Layered

A layered volume is a virtual Volume Manager object that nests volumes within volumes to create more complex volume structures that mirror data at a more granular level.



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