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General concepts

CDS provides you with a foundation for moving data between different systems within a heterogeneous environment. The machines may be running HP-UX, AIX, Linux or the SolarisTM operating system (OS), and they may all have direct access to physical devices holding data. CDS allows Symantec's Veritas products and applications to access data storage independently of the operating system platform, enabling them to work transparently in heterogeneous environments.

The following levels in the device hierarchy, from disk through file system, must provide support for CDS to be used:

End-user applications 

Application level. 

Veritas™ File System (VxFS) 

File system level. 

Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) 

Volume level. 

Operating system 

Device level 

CDS is a license-enabled feature that is supported at the disk group level by VxVM and at the file system level by VxFS.

CDS utilizes a new disk type (auto:cdsdisk). To effect data sharing, VxVM supports a new disk group attribute (cds) and also supports different OS block sizes.


  Note   CDS allows data volumes and their contents to be easily migrated between heterogeneous systems. It does not enable concurrent access from different types of platform unless such access is supported at all levels that are required.