VxFS includes the following features:

• Extent-based allocation

  Extents allow disk I/O to take place in units of multiple blocks if storage is allocated in consecutive blocks.

• Extent attributes

  Extent attributes are the extent allocation policies associated with a file.

• Fast file system recovery

  VxFS provides fast recovery of a file system from system failure.

• Extended mount options

  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.

• Enhanced data integrity modes

  VxFS avoids the problem of uninitialized data appearing in a file by waiting until the data has been flushed to disk before updating the new file size to disk.

• Enhanced performance mode

  VxFS provides mount options to improve performance.

• Modes of temporary file systems

  VxFS supplies an option to allow users to achieve higher performance on temporary file sytems by delaying the logging for most operations.

• Improved synchronous writes

  VxFS provides superior performance for synchronous write applications.

• Large files and file systems support

  VxFS supports files larger than two gigabytes and large file systems up to 256 terabytes.

• Access control lists (ACLs)

  An Access Control List (ACL) stores a series of entries that identify specific users or groups and their access privileges for a directory or file.

• Storage Checkpoints

  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.

  See the Veritas Storage Foundation Advanced Features Administrator's Guide.

• Online backup

  VxFS provides online data backup using the snapshot feature.

• Quotas

  VxFS supports quotas, which allocate per-user and per-group quotas and limit the use of two principal resources: files and data blocks.

• Cluster File System

  Clustered file systems are an extension of VxFS that support concurrent direct media access from multiple systems.

• Improved database performance

  Databases can be created on the character devices to achieve the same performance as databases created on raw disks.

• Cross-platform data sharing

  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.

  See the Veritas Storage Foundation Advanced Features Administrator's Guide.

• File Change Log

  The VxFS File Change Log tracks changes to files and directories in a file system.

• Multi-volume support

  The multi-volume support feature allows several volumes to be represented by a single logical object.

• Dynamic Storage Tiering

  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.

  See the Veritas Storage Foundation Advanced Features Administrator's Guide.

• 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.

  See the Veritas Storage Foundation Advanced Features Administrator's Guide.