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Volume Management On OS X
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Senior User
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Glasgow, Scotland UK
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I wonder if anyone has any experience with Volume Management software for OS X. Is there any to begin with? AFAIK Apple doesn't provide any but I was wondering if there were any implementations, perhaps included with OS X server or as part of Apple's SAN offering or even as third party software.
I'm looking for something the abilities of the likes of Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) or Veritas's volume management software. Perhaps the lack of software like this is part of the reason Apple is so interested in getting ZFS in OS X?
If anyone has any thoughts on this I'd be pleased hear them.
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"You can't waste a life hating people, because all they do is live their life, laughing, doing more evil."
-ALPHA ROBERTSON,whose daughter was one of four girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: San Jose, Ca
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What is your goal here? Apple's typical approach when you need volume management is to go external and use things like XSan to do that management.
Short of that Apple handles multiple (separate) volumes just fine, has a middling soft-RAID solution, and has some great image tools to help you with migrations. But you have indicated a huge space without any details.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2001
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Not sure exactly what you're looking for. There are a number of "volume management" solutions but without word on what you really want (SAN?) it's tough to recommend anything.
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Senior User
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Glasgow, Scotland UK
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Sorry, I suppose i should have been more specific. What I'm interested in achieving is mirroring the boot partitions. For example in a previous setup with, admittedly much higher end, Sun equipment I used 3 internal disks to create a three way mirror of the boot disk. The aim was to create a highly available system. In SVM one can do this by mapping each partition required for boot to a 'meta-device' and then setting them up as mirrors of each other which means that they are visible as a single 'meta-device' which is then set as the boot device for the system. I'm not trying to replace mid-range Sun equipment with Apple's but I just wondered how close I could get using MacOS.
I suppose Apple's answer to this is really their RAID implementation which i think one can boot from, right? Is there anything perhaps as a little closer to SVM perhaps with mirrors sometimes its nicer just to have mirrors rather than having to wait for something rebuild a RAID mirror.
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"You can't waste a life hating people, because all they do is live their life, laughing, doing more evil."
-ALPHA ROBERTSON,whose daughter was one of four girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963.
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Senior User
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Glasgow, Scotland UK
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Oh also, does anyone know if I could boot from Apple's SAN unit? Just some idle wondering....
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"You can't waste a life hating people, because all they do is live their life, laughing, doing more evil."
-ALPHA ROBERTSON,whose daughter was one of four girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963.
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Moderator
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hilbert space
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2001
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
Xsan wouldn't be a good fit here. You can't boot off it, and it's very complex for anything under 3 or more workstations which want to share the same large pool of storage.
I can't recall if you can boot Intel machines off the Xserve RAID. Something tells me there was an issue initially; I can't recall whether it was resolved.
Anyway, "volume management" is built into the OS. You can create a RAID using Disk Utility, either via the GUI (in /Applications/Utilities), or via the command line (see 'man diskutil' for details). The built in software can do RAID 0 and RAID 1. There is also a 3rd party product called SoftRAID which has a few more features and a rock solid reputation.
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Senior User
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Glasgow, Scotland UK
Status:
Offline
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Ah of course, thanks guys! I'd forgotten about using the RAID software for mirroring, I guess I just spent a little too long working with Solaris for this stuff
The XSan thing was more idle musing than anything else, if only my budget would stretch to something as nice!
Oreo, I would actually respectfully disagree with your definition that this isn't volume management. Although I'm not trying to pool the storage together I was looking to create and manage a volume which surely qualifies as volume management?
Anyways, I like the idea of RAID0 for booting from, obviously the idea is that the system can survive a boot disk failure without having to rebuild the system.
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"You can't waste a life hating people, because all they do is live their life, laughing, doing more evil."
-ALPHA ROBERTSON,whose daughter was one of four girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963.
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