Solaris Volume Manager
I had the pleasure of adding a “hot spare” filesystem to our Solaris box today. Actually, it was a continuation of what I started the other day. Now I’ve never been particularly exceptional with disk devices (or block devices in general) in Solaris, so I knew this was going to be a challenge. And who doesn’t like a good challenge?
As a basis for my rant, let me start by saying that I’ve had no problems picking up the other UNIX’s (HP-UX and AIX) LVM implementations. Both are structured similar to Linux (or should that be Linux is structured similar to them? 
). Anyways, both follow the relatively simple notion of physical volumes, volume groups and logical volumes. Physical volumes are your physical devices (disks and other block devices). Volume groups are pools of physical volumes. Lastly logical volumes are your partitions upon which you create your file systems.
Solaris doesn’t implement any of this. At least not in the same manner. Near as I can tell, they roll the last two layers together to form what they simply call a volume. The worst though is the CLI tools used to create and manage them. It doesn’t help that I inherited this box from the guy that left, and without much notes. He didn’t split the file system up very well. If this were the other boxes I’d simple add another PV to the VG and then expand the drowning LV’s. Instead I can read through books on this subject to understand Sun’s take on LVM.
I ended up skirting the issue and not using their SVM. Since this is just for emergency sake, LVM isn’t really neccessary. Still it would be nice to conquer SVM.
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