VxFS includes the following features:
Extents allow disk I/O to take place in units of multiple blocks if storage is allocated in consecutive blocks.
Extent attributes are the extent allocation policies associated with a file.
VxFS provides fast recovery of a file system from system failure.
The VxFS file system supports extended mount options to specify enhanced data integrity modes, enhanced performance modes, temporary file system modes, improved synchronous writes, and large file sizes.
Large files and file systems support
VxFS supports files larger than two gigabytes and large file systems up to 256 terabytes.
VxFS provides online data backup using the snapshot feature.
VxFS supports quotas, which allocate per-user and per-group quotas and limit the use of two principal resources: files and data blocks.
Clustered file systems are an extension of VxFS that support concurrent direct media access from multiple systems.
Backup and restore applications can leverage Storage Checkpoint, a disk- and I/O-efficient copying technology for creating periodic frozen images of a file system.
Cross-platform data sharing allows data to be serially shared among heterogeneous systems where each system has direct access to the physical devices that hold the data.
The VxFS File Change Log tracks changes to files and directories in a file system.
The multi-volume support feature allows several volumes to be represented by a single logical object.
The Dynamic Storage Tiering (DST) option allows you to configure policies that automatically relocate files from one volume to another, or relocate files by running file relocation commands, which can improve performance for applications that access specific types of files.
Storage Foundation Thin Reclamation
The Thin Reclamation feature allows you to release free data blocks of a VxFS file system to the free storage pool of a Thin Storage LUN. This feature is only supported on file systems mounted on a VxVM volume.