Volume manager Migration from LVM to VxVM in Linux – Part 1

 

We all know that storage is key requirement for any server environment and the requirement for storage is always dynamic in nature. When we talk about the cost, providing highly redundant storage to each server is most expensive task for any organization and no company want to waste the storage with fixed allocation to each server. And  Companies  had huge requirement for the applications which has capability to dynamically add or reduce storage to the servers without affecting the operations.  And this requirement increased the demand for user friendly and effective volume manager tools.  Both the Operating System Vendors and third party vendors started providing volume manager tools to the industry, and below are some of the major Volume manager tools in place right now:

• Solaris native Volume manager tools – SVM  and ZFS
• Linux  native volume manager tools – LVM
• Symantic native volume manager tools  – VxVM

And most of these volume managers works with  similar  logic i.e.  Group the all the individual disk space together, divide them into smaller slices, and then share them back to each one as per the requirement.

And you might be having a question like – ” If both tools for serves the purpose of volume management why do we need to migrate from one to another?”.

And the answer is – ” In heterogeneous enterprise environment, sometimes we might need to move applications running on one type  of operating system ( Linux) to different type operating system ( Solaris) along with the related storage volumes. LVM is native volume manager that works only of Linux, whereas VxVM is OS neutral and works good for all solaris, linuxand windows. And that makes VxVM volumes more portable than the volumes manged by native volume mangers”.

Before we talk about Volume manage migration from LVM to VxVM, we should understand the Conceptual similarity between LVM and VxVM, and below diagram explains that part well.

 

 

Below table explains each component from the above diagram in simple terms:

I am going to split this entire concept into multiple posts so that it wont be difficult to beginners to understand the complete process.  I will be discussing the commands to create each of the above component in both LVM and VxVM in next post, and then we will go for actual migration procedure of the Volume Manager.