Veritas Volume Manager vs DiskSuite:use one or both at the same time? Conflicting messages from Sun.

From the "Configuring Boot Disks With Solstice DiskSuite Software" BluePrint page 6 (April 2002):Despite the popularity of VxVM software, we strongly discourage its use on the system disk. Implying that you should always use DiskSuite for mirroring your system disk (or Solaris Volume Manager as it is called these days - just to make sure we are not confused).

From the Sun "Boot Disk Management" book chapter 9/p186 on "Using Multiple Logical Volume Managers" (after exploring the pros and cons of using two volume managers on the same machine): Regardless of your ability to standardize on a single LVM in the datacenter we strongly recommend that you use only one LVM on a system. Notice the word strongly are used both places. The OnLine Blueprint is now unavailable and there's a message on the blueprint website (with the annoying american date format and a spelling mistake): This article is temporarily unavailables, please check back (12/9/02).

I am with the authors of the book on this one - use one volume manager (mangler?), not two on each system. If you are afraid of recovery issues try to follow the VxVm blueprints. Having a 4 disk configuration for all sorts of redundancy might be overkill and if there's a lot of pain (or perceived pain) with vxvm recovery the default behaviour of vxvm should probably be changed by Veritas (changes are described in the "Toward a Reference Configuration for VxVm Managed Boot Disks" (August 2000) blueprint).

Sun is a big company and sometime does not agree with itself. Meanwhile the engineers are battling it out.
"Configuring Boot Disks With Solstice DiskSuite Software" book links: ->amazon.com ->amazon.co.uk