Veritas Volume Manager offers a variety of layouts that allow you to configure your database to meet performance and availability requirements. The proper selection of volume layouts provides optimal performance for the database workload.

An important factor in database performance is the tablespace placement on the disks.

Disk I/O is one of the most important determining factors of your database's performance. Having a balanced I/O load usually means optimal performance. Designing a disk layout for the database objects to achieve balanced I/O is a crucial step in configuring a database.

When deciding where to place tablespaces, it is often difficult to anticipate future usage patterns. VxVM provides flexibility in configuring storage for the initial database set up and for continual database performance improvement as needs change. VxVM can split volumes across multiple drives to provide a finer level of granularity in data placement. By using striped volumes, I/O can be balanced across multiple disk drives. For most databases, ensuring that different containers or tablespaces, depending on which database you are using, are distributed across the available disks may be sufficient.

Striping also helps sequential table scan performance. When a table is striped across multiple physical devices, a high transfer bandwidth can be achieved by closely matching several DB2 parameters to ensure that database extents match the stripe size for the device. Another very important consideration when using the DB2 database, which by default performs striping at the tablespace container level, is setting the DB2_STRIPED_CONTAINERS variable.

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