12 Using Volumes; Volumes And Server Access; Prerequisites; Planning Volumes - HP StoreVirtual 4000 User Manual

12 Using volumes

A volume is a logical entity that is made up of storage on one or more storage systems. It can be
used as raw data storage or it can be formatted with a file system and used by a host or file server.
Create volumes on clusters that contain one or more storage systems.
Before creating volumes, plan your strategies for using the volume: how you plan to use it, its size,
how servers will access it, and how you will manage backups of the data, whether through Remote
Copy or third-party applications, or both.

Volumes and server access

After you create a volume, assign it to one or more servers to provide access to volumes by
application servers. For detailed information, see

Prerequisites

Before you create a volume, you must have created a management group and at least one cluster.
For more information, see the following:
"Working with management groups" (page 103)
"Creating a cluster" (page 132)

Planning volumes

Planning volumes takes into account multiple factors:
The number of volumes you need
The type of volumes you are creating - primary or remote
The size for each volume
Whether you plan to use snapshots
The level of data protection required
Whether you plan to grow the volume, or leave it the same size
NOTE: Microsoft Windows 2008 supports dynamic disks. If you mount HP LeftHand Storage
volumes on Windows 2008 servers and use Windows Server Manager to format disks, be aware
that HP LeftHand Storage only supports simple volumes on dynamic disks. The other types of volumes
(striped, spanned, mirrored, RAID-5) are not supported with HP LeftHand Storage features such as
extending volumes, creating and mounting snapshots, and Remote Copy.
TIP: If you plan to mount file systems, create a volume for each file system you plan to mount.
Then grow each file system independently.
Number of volumes
For information about the recommended maximum number of volumes and snapshots that can be
created in a management group, see
"Controlling server access to volumes" (page
"Configuration Summary overview" (page
197).
106).
Volumes and server access 155