VIOS shared storage pools and thin-provisioning

Introduction to VIOS shared storage pool

I like the power Systems and always worry about why the power Systems has no snapshots and thin-provisioning features, and finally, I found that IBM power Systems introduced the shared storage pool concept, which supports both functions.

As the name suggests, a shared storage pool is primarily a shared storage resource (SAN disk) across a set of IBM VIOS instances. Not only as physical disks, but as logical volumes in shared storage pools, as logical units (LUs). Logical units appear in the cluster storage pool mainly as file backup storage.

The VIOS version should be at least 2.2.0.11. I tested the related features in the VIOS 2.2.1.4. The current version of VIOS is 2.2.2.1, there can be 16 nodes in the cluster, and each VIOS node can support up to 200 clients.

The shared storage pool concept leverages the Cluster aware Aix (CAA) feature in IBM Aix to form a VIOS cluster. Using the CAA feature, clusters can monitor peers in the cluster.

In this article, I used two VIOS servers that were hosted on two different physical systems. As you navigate through this article, we'll see more information about the following tasks.

Create a cluster and shared storage pool

Verifying the status of a cluster

List properties for shared storage pools

Create a logical unit

Assigning logical units to clients

Modify Cluster

Features include:

Thick Provisioning

Thin-provisioning

Snapshot features

Create

Rolling back

Delete

Requirements

IBM PowerVM Standard Edition

VIOS version 2.2.0.11, Fix pack, Service Pack 1 and later

At least two disks: one for the CAA repository and the other for storage pools.

Experimental settings

Figure 1 shows the experimental settings used in this article to illustrate this feature.

Figure 1. Experimental environment settings