Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0 AdministratorÆs Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

19Understanding ISP
The benefits of ISP
Support for ISP in the vxassist command
In release 5.0 of VxVM, it is now possible to use the vxassist command to create
and administer ISP volumes. The
vxassist command now accepts the same
specification of templates, capabilities and rules as the
vxvoladm command, and
a set of
vxassist storage specification attributes are automatically translated
into equivalent ISP rules.
If the -o intent option is specified, vxassist creates an ISP volume, and it also
sets up a storage pool in the disk group if one does not already exist. If a storage
pool already exists in a disk group, the
vxassist command attempts to create an
ISP volume unless you specify the
-o nointent option.
All operations in this book that use the
vxassist command have an equivalent
vxvoladm command, which is obtained by substituting vxvoladm for vxassist.
Any other arguments to the command remain the same. A
vxvoladm command is
shown if there is no equivalent
vxassist command.
Summary of the benefits of using ISP
The following list summarizes the main benefits that Veritas ISP provides over
the existing storage allocation features in
vxassist:
■ Storage is automatically allocated based on abstract requirements such as
the desired capabilities of a volume.
■ Prefabricated capabilities that are provided by vendor-specific features of
intelligent storage arrays can be encoded as storage attributes, and used to
allocate storage.
■ Volumes can be created or grown in batch mode safe in the knowledge that
ISP will balance the requirements of all volumes.
■ All ISP operations preserve the original intent of the volumes. There is no
possibility that operations such as grow, evacuate, mirror, or add column can
accidentally degrade the reliability or performance capabilities of a volume.
■ ISP is SAN-aware and understands SAN attributes. It is also capable of using
VAIL to learn the capabilities of LUNs.
■ Disk tags, administered using the vxdisk command or the VEA graphical
user interface, allow you to define attributes for LUNs that lie outside their
discovered hardware characteristics, and to assign values to these
attributes.