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Chapter
16
Performance monitoring
and tuning
Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) can improve overall system performance by
optimizing the layout of data storage on the available hardware. This chapter
contains guidelines establishing performance priorities, for monitoring
performance, and for configuring your system appropriately.
Performance guidelines
VxVM allows you to optimize data storage performance using the following two
strategies:
■ Balance the I/O load among the available disk drives.
■ Use striping and mirroring to increase I/O bandwidth to the most frequently
accessed data.
VxVM also provides data redundancy (through mirroring and RAID-5) that
allows continuous access to data in the event of disk failure.
Data assignment
When deciding where to locate file systems, you, as a system administrator,
typically attempt to balance I/O load among the available disk drives. The
effectiveness of this approach is limited by the difficulty of anticipating future
usage patterns, as well as the inability to split file systems across the drives. For
example, if a single file system receives the most disk accesses, moving the file
system to another drive also moves the bottleneck to that drive.
VxVM can split volumes across multiple drives. This permits you a finer level of
granularity when locating data. After measuring actual access patterns, you can
adjust your previous decisions on the placement of file systems. You can
reconfigure volumes online without adversely impacting their availability.