The Extended Copy Service feature of VxVM works in tandem with the extended copy engines from array vendors. When VxVM detects that the source and destination devices are enabled for extended copy, VxVM automatically off loads copy requests to the array's copy manager.
The benefits of the Extended Copy Service are:
Non-disruptive copy operations from disk to disk. The host server remains online during the copy and the data being copied remains accessible to the server.
Server-free copy operation. The copy operation is done between the array subsystem and the target disk. The data copy operation does not use any CPU or I/O resources on the host server.
To see whether the Extended Copy Service feature is enabled on a disk, use the vxprint command as shown in the following example. The feature is enabled if an ecopy_enabled entry appears in the flags line.
# vxprint -l disk03 Disk group: rootdg Disk: disk03 info: diskid=1234567890.59.vm250e1.veritas.com assoc: device=c2t2d0s2 type=auto flags: autoconfig ecopy_enabled device: path=/dev/vx/dmp/c2t2d0s4 devinfo: publen=35354136 privlen=9167
If required, you can use the -o noecopy option to turn off Extended Copy Service for each invocation of the vxplex att, cp, mv and snapstart commands, and the vxsd mv command.