I've used VxVM at various jobs for several years.  It's got the stuff that
any Volume Management worth its salt should have (various RAID levels (0, 1,
0+1, 1+0, 5), the ability to "encapsulate" raw disks with data on them into
virtual ones, etc.).  It's also got some pretty kewl features (e.g. the
ability to export/import disk groups between SAN-connected hosts, on-the-fly
volume resizing, a slick GUI that lets you manage all of the virtual disks
on all of the heterogeneous servers in your environment from one place,
tight integration with other Veritas products (Cluster Server, File System,
etc.).  And it's got one other feature:  a huge price tag.  When I say huge,
think 5 figgers.  They have this arcane licensing scheme that ties the price
of the software and support to the size of the system.  I would take a look
at Veritas's site and see what bells and whistles they have that the
built-in Linux LVM doesn't, and draw up a feature by feature comparison of
the two alternatives.  If you (or the person that signs the checks) thinks
those bells 'n whistles are worth what VxVM costs, then there ya go-- buy
VxVM.  Otherwise, if you don't think a slick GUI is that important (and
lemme tell ya, it's REAAAAALY slick) and you're not going to be moving disk
groups around among servers, then maybe the built-in LVM would be 'adequate'
for your needs. 

Also, looking at Veritas' site
(http://www.veritas.com/products/category/ProductDetail.jhtml?productId=volu
memanagerwin), it doesn't look like VxVM is supported on RedHat 8.0.  But,
then again, I thought Oracle was only supported on RedHat Advanced Server,
so if you're running Oracle on RH8, you may not be concerned with
"supported" configurations anyway.  :)

~Jeff

On Friday, March 28, 2003 11:13 AM, Joel Dudley wrote:

> Hello all,
>    We are going to be setting up a few 2+ terabyte disk 
> arrays here at work and I have some questions about volume 
> management. Some here at work are pushing for Veritas 
> Volume Manager but I would like to use an open-source 
> solution if possible. I know about Logical Volume Manager 
> for Linux but not enough to compare it to Veritas' product. 
> The disk array will basicly be partitioned to store Oracle 
> databases running on RedHat 8. Thanks.
> -- 
> Joel Dudley
> Faculty Research Associate
> Arizona State University
> Center for Evolutionary and Functional Genomics
> http://lsweb.la.asu.edu/skumar/