Inside Solaris™ 9

Virtual Volume Management

With standard disk devices, each disk slice has its own physical and logical device. In addition, with standard Solaris file systems, a file system cannot span more than one disk slice. In other words, the maximum size of a file system is limited to the size of a single disk. On a large server with many disk drives, standard methods of disk slicing are inadequate and inefficient. This has been a limitation in all UNIX systems until the introduction of virtual disks, also called virtual volumes. To eliminate the limitation of one slice per file system, there are virtual volume management packages that are able to create virtual volume structures in which a single file system can consist of nearly an unlimited number ...