ADVANCED DISK MANAGEMENT

VIRTUAL FILE SYSTEMS


DiskSuite

Solstice DiskSuite 'metadevice' /dev/md/rdsk/d01 /dev/md/dsk/d01
DiskSuite GUI: /usr/sbin/metatool
DiskSuite also has command line interface with most commands starting with 'meta'.

Volume Manager

Solstice Enterprise Volume Mgr 'volume' /dev/rdsk/rootdg/vol01 /dev/vx/dsk/rootdg/vol01
(aka Veritas Volume Mgr)
Disk group is a group of VM disks which are sliced into Subdisks which can be combined to make a Plex
which are combined to make a Volume.
Volume Mgr GUI: vxva
Volume Mgr Menu: vxdiskadm
Volume Mgr also has command line interface with most commands starting with 'vx'.

Terms

RAID Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks
Concatenated a virtual device that combines slices from one or more physical disks that are used
sequentially.
Striped a virtual device that combines interleaved slices from one or more physical disks


RAID Levels (brief listing, there are more)

0 concatenated or striped
1 mirror
5 block-interleaved striping with distributed parity
10 mirrored striping or striped mirroring (RAID 1 + 0)


Pseudo File Systems

Type Info
procfs Process file system lists active processes in the /proc directory, sub-directories named by
process id contain files with info on that process.
tmpfs Temporary file system for file storage in momory without needing to write to disk,
created & destroyed when system is rebooted.
fdfs File Descriptor file system provides explicit names for opening files using file descriptors
in the /dev/fd directory.
/dev/fd/0 stdin
/dev/fd/1 stdout
/dev/fd/2 stderr
/dev/fd/3 name of file.
swapfs Swap file system used by the kernel as virtual memory storage when the system doesn't
have enough physical memory for it's needs.

swap command
-l lists the status of swap space
-a adds to swap
-d deletes from swap
-s list summary of swap space
 

                                                                                                       Back     Home