On Tue, 9 Aug 2005, Darren Dunham wrote:

>> But I'd like to be sure that it's the entire partition that FlashBackup
>> will backup.  If FlashBackup will constrain itself to just backup the
>> entire (ufs) file system, then I can go ahead and allocate the partition
>> in advance, and then only grow the file system as necessary.  If
>> FlashBackup is going to backup the entire partition, then I'll have to go
>> to the extra trouble of expanding the capacity of the partition *and*
>> growing the filesystem a couple of times a year.
>
> I'm pretty certain that's correct.  But other than the overhead of
> keeping the free space, is the extra step of enlarging the slice that
> much worse?

Yes, you're right.  I wasn't thinking of just having the space available 
in the next slice, I was thinking I'd be going through the hardware raid 
controller to enlarge a logical drive or something.  Thanks.

>> I've already determined that I can't use Sun's DiskSuite in conjunction
>> with FlashBackup.  And I'm trying to avoid using the Veritas Volume
>> Manager as well, mainly to avoid the cost.
>
> Ouch.  I wasn't aware of that.  What problems did you run into?

I haven't tried it, but it's documented:

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/264220.htm, page 100, under 
"restrictions":

        FlashBackup supports the following I/O system components: ufs,
        VxFS, and Windows NTFS file systems, VxVM volumes and LVM volumes, and 
raw
        disks. Other components (such as non-VERITAS volume managers or storage
        replicators) are not supported.

plus, a pre-sales engineer confirmed that shortcoming for me.

-hal