Vinum is a

logical volume manager In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, ...

, also called software

RAID Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to: Attack * Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground * Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business * Panty raid, a prankish raid by male colleg ...

, allowing implementations of the RAID-0, RAID-1 and

RAID-5 In computer storage, the standard RAID levels comprise a basic set of RAID ("redundant array of independent disks" or "redundant array of inexpensive disks") configurations that employ the techniques of striping, mirroring, or parity to create l ...

models, both individually and in combination. The original Vinum was part of the base distribution of the

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

operating system since 3.0, and also

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...

between 2003-10-10 and 2006-02-25, as well as descendants of FreeBSD, including

DragonFly BSD DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in ...

; in more recent versions of

, it has been replaced with gvinum, which was first introduced around

6. Vinum

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

is maintained in the FreeBSD and DragonFly

source tree In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

s. Vinum supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and

JBOD The most widespread standard for configuring multiple hard disk drives is RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks), which comes in a number of standard configurations and non-standard configurations. Non-RAID drive architectures a ...

. Vinum was inspired by Veritas Volume Manager. Vinum is invoked as gvinum (

GEOM GEOM is the main storage framework for the FreeBSD operating system. It is available in FreeBSD 5.0 and later releases, and provides a standardized way to access storage layers. GEOM is modular and allows for ''geom modules'' to connect to the fra ...

Vinum) on FreeBSD version 5.4 and up. In modern FreeBSD, it may be considered to be a legacy volume manager; modern alternatives being

and

ZFS ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...

. In NetBSD, it has been removed before NetBSD 4.0 due to lack of interest and maintenance; RAIDframe was cited as providing similar functionality. In

, DragonFly's own

HAMMER A hammer is a tool, most often a hand tool, consisting of a weighted "head" fixed to a long handle that is swung to deliver an impact to a small area of an object. This can be, for example, to drive nails into wood, to shape metal (as ...

filesystem already implements network mirroring, and the utility could be used to configure , another software

implementation, which originally appeared with FreeBSD 6.0 as , but was deprecated with FreeBSD 9, and removed before FreeBSD 10.0; and a

's port of Red Hat's

lvm2 In Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a device mapper framework that provides logical volume management for the Linux kernel. Most modern Linux distributions are LVM-aware to the point of being able to have their root file systems on a log ...

is also available in the base system of DragonFly as well all in addition to vinum.

Software RAID vs. Hardware RAID

The distribution of data across multiple disks can be managed by either dedicated hardware or by software. Additionally, there are hybrid RAIDs that are partly software- and partly hardware-based solutions. With a software implementation, the operating system manages the disks of the array through the normal drive controller ( ATA,

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host adapter, host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) ...

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data c ...

, etc.). With present

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

speeds, software RAID can be faster than hardware RAID. A hardware implementation of RAID requires at a minimum a special-purpose RAID controller. On a desktop system, this may be a

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Prov ...

expansion card, or might be a capability built into the motherboard. In larger RAIDs, the controller and disks are usually housed in an external multi-bay enclosure. This controller handles the management of the disks, and performs parity calculations (needed for many RAID levels). This option tends to provide better performance, and makes operating system support easier. Hardware implementations also typically support hot swapping, allowing failed drives to be replaced while the system is running. In rare cases hardware controllers have become faulty, which can result in data loss. Hybrid RAIDs have become very popular with the introduction of inexpensive hardware RAID controllers. The hardware is a normal disk controller that has no RAID features, but there is a boot-time application that allows users to set up RAIDs that are controlled via the

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the ...

. When any modern operating system is used, it will need specialized RAID drivers that will make the array look like a single block device. Since these controllers actually do all calculations in software, not hardware, they are often called "fakeraids". Unlike software RAID, these "fakeraids" typically cannot span multiple controllers.

Example configuration

A simple example to mirror drive enterprise to drive excelsior (RAID1):

drive enterprise device /dev/da1s1d
drive excelsior device /dev/da2s1d
volume mirror
  plex org concat
    sd length 512m drive enterprise
  plex org concat
    sd length 512m drive excelsior

References

External links

Vinum page in the official FreeBSD handbook

Sourceforge page

- FreeBSD documentation project

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vinum Volume Manager Rotating disc computer storage media Volume manager RAID BSD software Computer data storage FreeBSD DragonFly BSD Operating system technology Storage software

Software RAID vs. Hardware RAID

Example configuration

See also

References

External links