VERITAS Foundation Suite for HP-UX

Transcription

1 VERITAS Foundation Suite for HP-UX Enhancing HP-UX Performance and Availability with VERITAS Foundation Products V E R I T A S W H I T E P A P E R

2 Table of Contents Introduction What is VERITAS Foundation Suite? OnlineJFS Online File System Resizing Online Defragmentation Online Backups Logical Volume Management VERITAS Volume Manager VERITAS Volume Manager and HP-UX 11i VERITAS Volume Manager and the HP Logical Volume Manager Mirroring with Fast Resynchronization Summary

3 Introduction Hewlett-Packard (HP) and VERITAS have worked together for years to provide HP-UX users with superior storage management capabilities. The Journaled File System (JFS) available today with HP-UX is based on VERITAS core technology, and the HP-UX 11i operating system includes a basic version of VERITAS Volume Manager. By upgrading to the full VERITAS Foundation Suite, HP-UX systems can leverage this partnership and take advantage of the industry s leading storage management platform for data availability and performance. VERITAS Foundation Suite combines VERITAS File System (OnlineJFS on HP systems) and VERITAS Volume Manager to create a flexible and configurable platform for highly available computing and a foundation for application-specific storage solutions. For HP servers powering demanding computing environments, VERITAS Foundation Suite enhances the basic capabilities of HP-UX. Foundation Suite is completely transparent to applications, works with a wide range of hardware devices and offers administrators powerful and easy-to-use interfaces for managing critical storage. The close partnership between Hewlett-Packard and VERITAS has significant benefits for HP users. For example, upgrading HP-UX 11i servers to the full Foundation Suite, with its comprehensive volume management capabilities, simply requires a license codeword. Support for these products is available from either HP or VERITAS. This paper describes the components of VERITAS Foundation Suite and how these products enhance capabilities within the HP-UX operating system to provide superior availability and application-optimized performance. What Is VERITAS Foundation Suite? VERITAS Foundation Suite is an integrated suite of file-system and logical volume management technologies. You can leverage the capabilities of VERITAS Foundation Suite to provide continuous access to data and optimal I/O performance and storage hardware usage for all your critical servers. VERITAS Foundation Suite includes enhanced versions of technologies that are already familiar to HP-UX users: OnLine Journaled File System (OnLineJFS) is an enhancement to the Hewlett-Packard JFS, offering online resizing, defragmentation and backup capabilities. OnlineJFS is bundled with HP-UX 11i Enterprise and Mission Critical operating environments and is available for other HP-UX 11i operating environments and earlier versions of HP-UX as well. VERITAS Volume Manager is a flexible logical volume manager that lets you create virtual volumes out of physical devices using a variety of striping and mirroring configurations, with online storage reconfiguration. This is an enhanced version of the basic VERITAS Volume Manager bundled with HP-UX 11i. Separately, each of these products delivers significant benefits. OnLineJFS improves system availability by supporting online administrative activities, thus reducing administrative downtime. VERITAS Volume Manager offers flexible mirroring and striping combinations, so you can develop storage configurations that optimize I/O for specific performance and availability requirements. As an integrated solution, the products create a powerful platform that simplifies management for the most demanding computing environments. For example, OnlineJFS automatically tunes I/O policies to match the Volume Manager s data layout. Graphical interfaces help identify I/O bottlenecks; online administration facilities let you change storage configurations on-the-fly to address problems and optimize performance. Foundation Suite also serves as a basis for other specialized or application-specific storage management offerings. VERITAS FastResync augments the Foundation Suite with fast and efficient mirror resynchronization, enabling the broad use of split mirrors for administrative activities. The Foundation Suite integrates closely with other VERITAS products for data availability, including VERITAS NetBackup and Editions. VERITAS Database Edition for Oracle is a Foundation Suite optimized for customers running Oracle Database Server. VERITAS Foundation Suite for HP-UX: Enhancing HP-UX Performance and Availability with VERITAS Foundation Products Page 1

4 OnlineJFS VERITAS File System has been a part of the HP-UX operating system since 1993, as the HP-UX Journaled File System (JFS). JFS is a high-integrity, highly available file system that offers significant benefits over traditional UNIX file systems, including: Extent-based allocation: JFS allocates data in extents instead of fixed blocks. An extent is one or more adjacent blocks of data in the file system. Files written in larger extents have less fragmentation and fewer indirect pointers than files written in the smaller, fixed-block sizes of traditional UNIX file systems. Disk I/O can occur in units of multiple blocks, so applications spend less time waiting for the disk head to cycle to the next set of blocks. For sequential I/O, multiple-block operations are considerably faster than block-at-a-time operations. Intent log: JFS stages small, random, synchronous writes of structural and user information in its intent log, which functions as a kind of transaction log for the file system. You can adjust how frequently the operations in the intent log are written to disk. In case of a failure, JFS replays the intent log instead of performing a full file system check. This ensures the structural integrity of the system while providing quick recovery after failures, even for very large file systems. Reduced file-system panics: JFS reduces failures due to file-system panics, keeping disk or file-system errors from causing system failure or corruption. OnlineJFS enhances the JFS file system by offering continuous access to data during administrative operations such as resizing, backups and defragmentation. Online File-System Resizing System usage inevitably changes over time. Administrators frequently find themselves needing to add space to a file system or wanting to free unused space in a file system. Traditional file systems require taking the file systems offline to perform these activities. Using OnlineJFS, you can resize file systems without disrupting access to the file systems, removing a potential source of system downtime. Online Defragmentation Although extent-based file systems experience less fragmentation in general than block-based file systems, eventually an active file system will become fragmented. Fragmentation reduces the efficiency and performance of the file system, making defragmentation a necessary administrative task. Traditionally, defragmentation is a time-consuming process that requires unmounting a file system, performing a backup and reloading the data on a newly created file system. OnlineJFS reorganizes the file system while it remains online and available, ensuring that users have continuous access to data. Online Backups System administrators often find themselves balancing the need for frequent backups (and hence fast and accurate recoveries) against the impact a backup has on a production system. For file systems, the issue is often one of consistency to get a consistent image, the backup must run against a file-system image with no updates in progress. OnlineJFS solves this problem by taking a snapshot image, against which a consistent backup can occur while updates continue to the main file system. The snapshot captures a point-in-time image of the blocks on the active file system, then tracks which blocks have changed. Note that this is not a complete copy of the file system; the snapshot itself stores only the blocks that have changed, which minimizes the impact on disk resources. There is no resynchronization when the backup is Page 2 VERITAS Foundation Suite for HP-UX: Enhancing HP-UX Performance and Availability with VERITAS Foundation Products

5 completed the snapshot can simply be dropped. This offers a fast and effective way to make backups without stopping updates to the file system. OnlineJFS is available for HP-UX and above. For HP-UX 11.0 and 11i, upgrading to OnlineJFS is as simple as obtaining a license codeword from HP or from VERITAS Software Corporation as part of VERITAS Foundation Suite. Logical Volume Management A logical volume manager overcomes the physical limitations of disk devices by combining physical storage in various ways into virtual volumes. To applications, these volumes behave just like physical devices. But they can be combined to provide much greater capacity, performance or reliability than any single physical device. VERITAS Volume Manager is the companion product to the VERITAS File System (OnlineJFS) in VERITAS Foundation Suite. Using VERITAS Volume Manager, you can create flexible storage configurations that meet specific application needs and that optimize performance and/or availability using standard disk devices. You can also leverage the capabilities of hardwarebased RAID devices by concatenating, striping or mirroring across RAID devices. VERITAS Volume Manager Like the OnlineJFS file system, VERITAS Volume Manager improves both the availability and performance of critical storage. In addition, its graphical, Java-based user interface makes critical storage more manageable and offers online reconfiguration and tuning capabilities. Volume Manager supports a wide variety of storage configurations. Logical volumes are assembled from some or all of the storage on physical devices and may be: Concatenated (spanning multiple physical devices) Striped (RAID-0) across multiple devices and controllers, with configurable stripe sizes Mirrored (RAID-1) Striped with parity (software-based RAID-5) RAID-5 with log Striped and mirrored (RAID-0+1) Mirrored stripes (RAID-1+0) These storage options are highly configurable. For example, you can stripe a logical volume across a large number of devices, with configurable stripe sizes, to optimize performance. Striping typically improves I/O performance, whereas mirroring protects data from device failures, improving availability of data. RAID-5, mirrored stripes and striping with mirroring combine performance and availability benefits. With Volume Manager, you can configure and reconfigure storage while it is online and available. Volume Manager further improves availability by supporting hot spares and hot relocation. If a device hosting redundant storage fails, such as a device used within a RAID-5 or mirrored volume, the hot relocation capability automatically restores the redundant data to the device identified as the spare device. When the failed disk is replaced, an unrelocate feature returns the configuration to its original state. Online tuning tools help identify and minimize storage bottlenecks. Administrators can add, remove and reconfigure disks while systems are online and available, simplifying ongoing administrative tasks. Virtualizing storage in logical volumes makes administering storage area networks (SANs) or other large storage environments much simpler. Logical disk groups simplify the process of moving data ownership between nodes in a SAN. VERITAS Foundation Suite for HP-UX: Enhancing HP-UX Performance and Availability with VERITAS Foundation Products Page 3

6 Volume Manager also works with a wide variety of hardware RAID devices. Volume Manager optimizes the performance of multicontroller disk arrays by spreading I/O across the multiple paths into the array. Like VERITAS File System, VERITAS Volume Manager is available on a wide range of hardware platforms, making it simpler to support heterogeneous environments. VERITAS Volume Manager and HP-UX 11i Since December 2000, HP has bundled a basic version of the VERITAS Volume Manager with the HP-UX 11i operating system. This basic version offers the ability to create and manipulate concatenated or striped logical volumes from a variety of physical devices, using a Java-based graphical interface that provides a comprehensive view of available storage. For systems that need enhanced availability and performance, upgrading to the full VERITAS Volume Manager provides the following features: More volume configuration options, including mirroring (RAID-1), striping + mirroring (RAID 1+0), mirrored stripes (RAID-0+1) and RAID-5 Online relayout capabilities Hot spare/hot relocation capabilities, automatically restoring redundant volumes after a single device failure Snapshots Dynamic multipathing (spreading I/O across multiple controllers) for active/active as well as active/passive arrays Support for a wide variety of arrays, including the XP512. VERITAS Volume Manager is available for HP-UX 11.0 and above and as an upgrade to HP-UX 11i. VERITAS Volume Manager and the HP Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Hewlett-Packard also offers a Logical Volume Manager (LVM) with basic logical volume management capabilities, including concatenation, striping, online volume resizing and online migration of data between physical devices. To implement mirroring or hot sparing using LVM, you need to add the HP MirrorDisk/UX product, which offers mirroring, hot sparing, online relayout, and online snapshots. Upgrading to the VERITAS Volume Manager offers a much more configurable environment than LVM and MirrorDisk/UX combined. Volume Manager features unavailable with the LVM and MirrorDisk/UX combination include: A Java-based graphical user interface (GUI) Mirrored stripes (RAID 1+0) RAID-5 and RAID-5 log Hot relocation and unrelocation to handle failures of redundant devices automatically Task Monitor Online relayout of one volume type to a different volume type. If you need mirroring and hot relocation, or if manageability is a concern, VERITAS Volume Manager offers significantly more options than LVM. LVM disks and Volume Manager logical disks can coexist in a system, although both cannot access different logical units on the same disk array because they use different multipathing technologies. Volume Manager includes utilities to convert LVM volume groups to Volume Manager diskgroups. Page 4 VERITAS Foundation Suite for HP-UX: Enhancing HP-UX Performance and Availability with VERITAS Foundation Products

7 Mirroring with Fast Resynchronization Mirroring is most commonly thought of as a technique for improving data availability. By mirroring data to multiple devices, you can protect the data from the loss of any single device. However, mirroring has another potential use creating point-in-time images of production data for administrative activities. This kind of mirror is often referred to as a third mirror because it typically supplements mirroring performed for the purpose of availability. In fact, you can have many additional mirror devices in a VERITAS Volume Manager mirrored volume. There are many potential uses for split mirrors, including: Performing analysis Running backups Testing patches or updates Running reports. In general, many administrative activities that require a consistent view or complete copy of production data can be performed from a split mirror volume. You can create and manage these mirrors using VERITAS Volume Manager, without any additional products. The downside to using split mirrors is the overhead associated with resynchronizing the mirrored volumes a data-intensive activity that can affect performance of the production volume. The VERITAS FastResync product enhances VERITAS Foundation Suite by offering a very fast resynchronization process. It tracks any changes to split mirror volumes in a configurable Data Change Map. On resynchronization, it writes only the changed data blocks instead of copying the entire mirror, for a fast and efficient operation. You can even decide which mirror to retain, and control the speed of the resynchronization process. Unlike mirroring solutions from hardware vendors such as EMC, VERITAS Foundation Suite and FastResync solution is array independent. It can work with any supported hardware array or with a bunch of disks configured into a mirrored logical volume, giving you the flexibility to leverage existing hardware or change storage vendors. Summary VERITAS Foundation Suite offers the management, I/O performance and data availability necessary for demanding computing environments. The Foundation Suite is available on many popular UNIX platforms; VERITAS Volume Manager supports Windows NT/Windows 2000 platforms as well. With this wide platform support, VERITAS Foundation Suite is the storage management platform of choice for heterogeneous or dynamic IT environments. In addition, VERITAS software works with a wide range of storage vendors arrays, leaving you free to optimize your existing hardware investment and choose or change storage vendors easily. The long-standing strategic relationship between VERITAS Software and Hewlett-Packard makes upgrading to the full Foundation Suite an easy decision. Both vendors offer support for the Foundation Suite components. For many HP-UX operating environments, upgrading requires only a new license codeword. The companies continue to work together to create innovative solutions for joint customers, integrating the strengths of the HP hardware and OS with VERITAS industryleading data availability solutions. VERITAS Foundation Suite for HP-UX: Enhancing HP-UX Performance and Availability with VERITAS Foundation Products Page 5

8 VERITAS Software Corporation Corporate Headquarters 1600 Plymouth Street Mountain View, CA or For additional information about VERITAS Software, its products, or the location of an office near you, please call our corporate headquarters or visit our Web site at V E R I T A S W H I T E P A P E R Copyright 2001 VERITAS Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS SOFTWARE, the VERITAS logo, Business Without Interruption, VERITAS The Data Availability Company, VERITAS Foundation Suite, VERITAS File System, VERITAS Volume Manager, VERITAS NetBackup, and VERITAS Database Edition are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the USA and/or other countries. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Printed in USA. May VER05-FNDSHPUXWPR