Administration Roles in ISP

The administration of ISP can seem overwhelming when compared with the traditional administration model in VERITAS Volume Manager. To simplify matters, it is useful to think in terms of three levels of administration based on level of knowledge of ISP, and frequency of application of this knowledge:

• Basic Administration Tasks
• Advanced Administration Tasks
• Expert Administration Tasks

Basic administration tasks are performed most often and require the least knowledge of ISP to perform. Expert storage administration tasks are performed least often and require the most knowledge of ISP to perform.

Basic Administration Tasks

Basic administration tasks include creating storage pools, and creating and administering volumes. This includes performing tasks such as adding or removing mirrors or columns from volumes, resizing volumes, and creating and using volume snapshots.

The system administrator's role requires the following knowledge of ISP:

• Familiarity with the meaning of the terms disk group, storage pool, template, user template, application volume, and capabilities such as reliability, performance and fault tolerance.
• What templates and user templates are available for use in creating volumes with the required capabilities.
• What templates and user templates are associated with the disk groups in which you will create volumes.
• How to use the VEA or the vxvoladm and vxtemplate commands to perform your tasks.

As a system administrator, you can use either the VEA or the vxvoladm and vxtemplate utilities to perform your tasks. The VEA graphical interface is most suitable for day-to-day administration. The vxvoladm utility is primarily intended for use in administration scripts. The vxtemplate utility allows you to find out which templates are associated with disk groups and with storage pools.

The use of vxvoladm to create application volumes is illustrated in Creation of Application Volumes.

Creation of Application Volumes

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System administration tasks are described in the following chapters:

• Creating Application Volumes
• Administering Application Volumes
• Administering Instant Snapshots

Advanced Administration Tasks

Advanced administration tasks include administering storage pools and user templates, creating clone pools, and creating volumes with additionally specified rules.

The system administrator's role requires the following knowledge of ISP:

• Knowledge of basic administration tasks, see Basic Administration Tasks.
• Familiarity with the meaning of the terms LUN, attribute, policy, intent, and rules such as those for confining or excluding how storage is allocated to new volumes.
• How to create or modify user templates, and then associate these with disk groups and storage pools.
• How to use the VEA or the command-line utilities to perform your tasks.

As a storage administrator, you can use either the VEA or command-line utilities to perform your tasks. The VEA interface is most suitable for day-to-day administration. The command-line utilities are primarily intended for use in administration scripts, but can also be used to compile and install user templates as illustrated in Creation of User Templates.

Creation of User Templates

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Creation of Storage Pools illustrates that the vxpool command is used to create storage pools with associated policies, templates and capabilities.

Creation of Storage Pools

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System administration tasks are described in the following chapters:

• Creating and Administering Storage Pools
• Creating and Modifying User Templates