The VERITAS File System (or VxFS; called JFS and OnlineJFS in

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrit ...

) is an extent-based

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one lar ...

. It was originally developed by

VERITAS Software Veritas Technologies LLC. is an American international data management company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company has its origins in Tolerant Systems, founded in 1983 and later renamed Veritas Software. It specializes in stora ...

. Through an

OEM An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...

agreement, VxFS is used as the primary filesystem of the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

. With on-line

defragmentation In the maintenance of file systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the degree of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contigu ...

and resize support turned on via license, it is known as ''OnlineJFS''. It is also supported on AIX,

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, Solaris,

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around t ...

SINIX Sinix may refer to: * SINIX, computer operating system * Şınıx Şınıx (also, Shinykh and Shynykh) is a village and municipality in the Gadabay Rayon of Azerbaijan. It has a population of 917. The municipality consists of the villages of Şı ...

/Reliant UNIX, UnixWare and SCO OpenServer. VxFS was originally developed for

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

Unix System Laboratories Unix System Laboratories (USL), sometimes written UNIX System Laboratories to follow relevant trademark guidelines of the time, was an American software laboratory and product development company that existed from 1989 through 1993. At first wh ...

. VxFS is packaged as a part of the

Veritas Storage Foundation Veritas Storage Foundation (VSF ), previously known as Veritas Foundation Suite, is a computer software product made by Veritas Software that combines Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and Veritas File System (VxFS) to provide online-storage manag ...

(which also includes Veritas Volume Manager).

History

According to the vendor, it was the first commercial

journaling file system A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system's main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a " journal", which is usually a circular log. In the ev ...

. That claim can be taken in two ways, i.e., the first implementation of a journaling file system in a commercial context, or the first file system available as an unbundled product. Dan Koren is cited as one of the original developers of VxFS. He notes in a mailing list that they "finished release 1.0 one year or so later" after starting development of VxFS under a contract with

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in 1990. Other sources agree that the product was first released in 1991. As the internet was not widely available in the early 1990s, getting a new file system deployed for Unix-like operating systems was more difficult, so the one- to two-year delay in the release and commercialization of this file system was not unusual.

Version history

The on-disk layout of VxFS is versioned and upgradeable while the file system is mounted. This file system has gone through ten versions. * Version 2 added support for filesets, dynamic inode allocation and ACLs. Layouts 1-3 stopped being supported in VxFS 4.0. * Version 4 added support for storage checkpoints and for

Veritas Cluster File System The Veritas Cluster File System (or VxCFS) is a cache coherent POSIX compliant shared file system built based upon VERITAS File System. It is distributed with a built-in Cluster Volume Manager (VxCVM) and components of other VERITAS Storage Foundat ...

. Version 4 was released in VxFS 3.2.1. Layout version 4 is no longer supported under VxFS 5.1. * Version 5 started support for file systems up to 32

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s () in size. Individual files can be up to 2 terabytes in size. Version 5 was introduced in VxFS 3.5 and is no longer supported under VxFS 5.1. * Version 6 added support for file systems and files up to 8

exabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s () in size. Version 6 also introduced support for named streams/resource forks, for multiple underlying volumes, and for file change logs. Version 6 was introduced in VxFS 4.0. * Version 7 extends support for multiple volumes to permit Dynamic Storage Tiering. Dynamic Storage Tiering allows root users to move files among different volumes, allocate files to different volumes at file creation time based on policy, and independently recover volumes, without altering the namespace of the file system. Version 7 was introduced in VxFS 5.0. * Version 8 enables support for file-level snapshots and shared extents. Version 8 was introduced in VxFS 5.1. * Version 9 enables support for file compression, deduplication, and partition directories. Version 9 was introduced in VxFS 6.0. * Version 10 enables support for maxlink, which permits a directory to contain more than 64K subdirectories. Version 10 was introduced in VxFS 6.1.

Parallel access mode

VxFS file system can run in ''single instance mode'' or in a ''parallel access / cluster mode''. The parallel mode allows for multiple servers (also known as cluster nodes) to simultaneously access the same file system. When run in this mode, VxFS is referred to as

. The Cluster File System provides cache coherency and

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming inte ...

compliance across nodes, so that data changes are atomically seen by all cluster nodes simultaneously. Because Cluster File System shares the same binaries and same on-disk layout as single instance VxFS, moving between cluster and single instance mode is straightforward.

References

External links

Veritas Services and Operations Readiness Tools (SORT) documentation search

VERITAS Storage Foundation

VxFS Quick Reference

VERITAS Cluster File System

Symantec Operations Readiness Tools
!-- ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED --> (SORT) {{Filesystem 1991 software Disk file systems Shared disk file systems HP software File systems supported by the Linux kernel

History

Version history

Parallel access mode

See also

References

External links