In VERITAS there are two ways to create objects. There's the "vxmake" way and the "vxassist" way. Here's the difference...

VxMake is an object creation tool that allows you to specifically build objects, one at a time, by your specific specs. The methods we mentioned before (add a disk, make a VM disk, create a subdisk, then...) would be an example of how we use vxmake. Piece by piece, we'd build out components, and assemble them. This is kool because there is no "guess work", meaning we are explicitly saying "build this!" and it's built. We'll learn more about vxmake, in detail, in the next course.

VxAssist is the other way. As you've been reading this course, have you said "this sure looks like a lot of work!"? Well, here's your answer: vxassist. When we want to build a volume, but we don't want to specify every little detail, we could add disks to make VM disks and then use vxassist to do the rest. So instead of using the "build this, and only this!" philosophy of vxmake, we turn to the vxassist mind set that sounds something like "OK, here are some disks, build me a RAID5 that can house 10G of data... I don't care how you do it, just hurry up." Vxassist is handy for a jam, or when you really just don't care exactly how things are set up. Again, in our following course we'll discuss object creation at length using vxassist.

Don't get any ideas yet about which one is better. When we get to the courses applicable to these tools and you see how they work with your own eyes (yup, you'll see lots of examples) then you can get defensive about your favorite. But also remember, you can use them both interchangeably in some cases, and often with use both. Keep your eyes open for these guys though, because they are very different ways of doing things.