Volume groups

A volume group allows for many related volumes to be grouped so that they can be managed together. A volume group also can ensure consistency across all volumes in the group when used with snapshot or replication functions.

Volume groups can be used with the following functions:

Safeguarded Copy

Safeguarded Copy function is a cyber-resiliency feature that creates immutable copies of data that cannot be changed or manipulated.

A Safeguarded volume group describes a set of source volumes that are backed up collectively with the Safeguarded Copy function. Safeguarded snapshots can be configured through an internal scheduler that is defined in a snapshot policy or can be configured with an external snapshot scheduling application such as IBM Copy Services Manager.

Snapshot

Snapshots are point-in-time copies of a volume group that cannot be directly accessed by hosts. To access the snapshot contents, you can create a clone or thin clone. You can schedule snapshots using a snapshot policy or an external snapshot scheduling application. For more details, see Snapshots.

High availability and disaster recovery

Policy-based high availability provides an active-active high availability solution that uses two independent systems in different locations. The storage will automatically remain accessible to hosts if there is an event that makes one of the systems unavailable. When using policy-based high availability, everything in a storage partition is highly available; all volume groups in a partition are replicated for high availability.

Policy-based replication for disaster recovery provides synchronous or asynchronous replication to another system for disaster recovery. Using this type of replication, a replication policy is assigned to individual volume groups to manage groups that are replicated.

You can move volumes from one volume group to another. If a volume group is within a storage partition, the new volume group must be in the same storage partition.