Logical Volume Managers - SF vs The Rest Of The World - Comparison Matrix?

[Alexandre_Rappo]

Hi all,

I am looking after the storage infrastructure made of a large set of point solutions and I need to streamline our storage activities on the host layer.

We have a lot of LVM flavors: Storage Foundation for Windows(SFW), Solaris SVM + ZFS, Linux Red Hat LVM, Windows LDM 2k3+2k8, VMware VMFS, etc...

As storage administrators, I think we all face the same baseline activities on the host:

BAU Quadrant:
 Storage Commission -----------   Storage Decommission
 Storage Allocation    -------------    Storage Reclamation

Advanced:
  Snapshots, migration, correction, replication, etc...

I am looking for a comparison matrix like this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_volume_management) that is listing the different Logical Volume Managers and their functionalities.

The key results are around the functionalities that can be done 'online', like file system expand and shrink....

if anyone has this info, please share!! (I am building one as well...)


http://eval.veritas.com/mktginfo/products/White_Papers/Storage_Server_Management/sfw41-ldm-compariso...

http://a248.e.akamai.net/f/248/5462/2h/www.symantecstore.com/v2.0-img/page-builder/Symantec/images/1...

http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/solaris10/zfs_veritas.pdf

Kind regards,

Alex Rappoport

[jayess]

Hi Alex, 

See below for some high level stuff.  

 Majority of Unix flavors support doing most of the storage activity be done online without causing outage. 

HPUX 11v2 and later are bundled with Veritas Vol. Mgr. So, no HP -LVM. 
HPUX 11v1 and older.  HP-LVM, resize only possible with Online JFS. Other Volume need to be offline to perform resize.

Solaris 10 update 3 and later- bundled with zfs. Pretty stable with update 8.  DMP available with MPxIO and zpools only can be grown. native shrink option not available.  LUN discovery doesn't require outage in most cases. 
Solaris 9 bundled with SVM.  resize to grow NOT shrink.  LUN discovery with certain HBA's and certain configuration may require outage. 
Solaris 8 SVM and some legacy slices.   resize to grow NOT shrink with SVM. slices out of question. LUN discovery with certain HBA's and certain configuration may require outage. 

AIX  5. AIX-LVM.  resize doesn't require outage in most cases.  

Linux RHEL - Native LVM, similar to HP-LVM. discovery and lun removal can be done online.  resize depends on type of filesystem.

[ScottK]

For file systems, wikipedia has a large matrix. It tends a bit to the technical esoterica, possibly because the contributors are likely engineers who worked on 'their' file system. But, you may find some nuggets of information there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems