Enterprise Volume Management System

Documentation

Screen Shots

Downloads

Hosted By:

GUI Screen Shots

Here are some screen shots of the EVMS Graphical User Interface.

Volume View:
Several logical volumes are displayed in an "exploded" view. Vol0 is an LVM2 region (LV) that spans two of the objects (PVs) in its container (VG). md0 is a RAID-5 device composed of four disk segments (partitions). Web_Root is a drive-link of three BBR objects. Music is a simple segment, turned into an EVMS volume.

Actions Menu:
The main volume panel, with the "Actions" and "Create" pull-down menus selected.

Creating a New Region:
Select "Actions->Create->Region" from the pull-down menu. Then select the desired plug-in. This example will be creating a new LVM2 region.

Selecting Objects:
After selecting the desired plug-in, a list of acceptable objects is displayed. For LVM2, this is a list of regions representing the freespace in each of the containers. Select the RootGroup container.

Options for the New Region:
Give the new region a name. Enter the size in MB. This region will be linear (stripes = 1).

Create Region Result:
Click the "Create" button, and view the resulting region.

Create Compatibility Volume:
In the "Available Objects" panel, right-click on the new region, and select "Create Compatibility Volume" to make this region accessible as a volume.

Volume View:
The "Volumes" panel again, with the newly created "new_root" LVM2 volume. It will be marked as "Modified" until changes are saved to disk.

Container View:
The "Container" panel, showing two LVM2 containers (VGs), TestGroup and RootGroup. TestGroup contains three objects (PVs), and RootGroup contains two objects (PVs). Both containers have one "data" region and one "freespace" region each. RootGroup is marked "Modified" since we just created a new region, and have not saved changes yet.

Container Details:
In the "Container" panel, right-click on "TestGroup" and select "Display Details". A multi-page window appears with a variety of information about that container.

Container Details:
On page 2 of the details for "TestGroup", click the "More" button next to "Number of Objects" for a list of the objects consumed by the container.

Container Details:
Click on the "More" button next to "hdd9" to see extra details about the first object in this container.

Container Details:
On page 2 for "hdd9", the "More" button will allow you to examine the physical to logical mappings for this object.

Another Create Example:
Now let's create another new region, this time using the RAID-5 plug-in from the MD region manager.

Selecting Objects for RAID-5:
Select four segments to include in the new RAID-5 region. (In general, with RAID, you will want to use whole disks, or at least segments that are all on different disks.)

Options for the new RAID-5:
For this new region, we can choose to add a spare to the array, we can set the chunk size, decide whether we want RAID-5 or RAID-4, and pick the type of parity algorithm to use.

MD Region Details:
After creating this new RAID-5 region, we can display its details, including extra information, such as its Working Superblock.

Creating a Snapshot:
Now let's create a snapshot of the "Music" volume. Select "Actions->Create->Feature Object" from the drop-down menu. Then select the "Snapshot Feature" from the list.

Options for a new Snapshot:
After selecting the desired backing-store for the snapshot, choose the desired volume to be snapshotted, and give the new snapshot object a name (music_snap). Let's also make this snapshot writeable.

Creating an EVMS Volume:
After the snapshot object has been created, use the right-click pop-up menu to turn it into an EVMS volume so it can be activated on the next save.

Volume View:
The "Volumes" panel once again, after creating the snapshot volume "Music_Snapshot". You can now see the temporary object that was added to the "Music" volume to allow it to be tracked as the snapshot original.

Snapshot Details:
Right-click on the "music_snap" object and select "Display Details" to get the information window about the snapshot volume. You can see additional information about the snapshot volume including how full the snapshot is.

Save Changes:
None of the new volumes created have been written to disk until you click on the Save button or select "Actions->Save..." from the pull-down menu.

Save Details:
You can click on the "Details" button on the Save panel to view all of the changes that will be saved.