Veritas Storage Foundation™ for Oracle 5.0.1 Administrator's Guide

Table 1-1
Veritas Volume Manager features (continued)
BenefitFeature
Separately licensed, optional feature that includes a
set of commands that allows you to use EMC
TimeFinder in conjunction with VxVM disk groups and
volumes that have been created on Symmetrix standard
devices.
Veritas FlashSnap Agent for
Symmetrix
Separately licensed, optional feature that provides data
replication for disaster recovery solutions.
Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR)
Simplifies administration and provides flexible use of
available hardware.
Free space pool management
Allows configuration changes without system or
database down time.
Online administration
For a more detailed description of VxVM and its features, refer to the Veritas
Volume Manager Administrators Guide.
About volumes
A volume is a virtual disk device that appears to applications, databases, and file
systems like a physical disk partition without the physical limitations of a disk
partition. A volume consists of one or more plexes, each holding a copy of the
selected data in the volume. Due to its virtual nature, a volume is not restricted
to a particular disk or a specific area of a disk. For example, a volume can span
multiple disks and can be used to create a large file system.
Volumes consist of other virtual objects that can be manipulated to change the
volume's configuration. Volumes and their virtual components are referred to as
Volume Manager objects. You can manipulate Veritas Volume Manager objects
in a variety of ways to optimize performance, provide redundancy of data, and
perform backups or other administrative tasks on one or more physical disks
without interrupting applications. As a result, data availability and disk subsystem
throughput are improved.
You can change the configuration of a volume without causing disruption to
databases or file systems that are using the volume. For example, you can mirror
a volume on separate disks or move the volume to use different disk storage.
Introducing Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle
How Veritas Volume Manager works
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