So now that you understand how a volume is built, and you understand a little about how it works lets talk about how you use them.

As mentioned earlier, a volume is a container. A "bit bucket" is you will. The advantage of a volume over a normal disk partition, is that volumes aren't static. You can grow, shrink, move, rearrange, and manipulate volumes in ways you just can't with a partition. You can also do all this in a mounted and live environment with no reboots. When you don't have enough disk space in a filesystem you can just grow the volume that the filesystem is on, and then grow the filesystem. Very easy.

But... you're saying to yourself, "how do I actually use a volume?" Well, that's easy enough. You use a volume just like a disk block device. Once VERITAS is installed and set up, you'll see a new directory in /dev. You'll see /dev/vx/, which is where all of your volume block devices are. If you created a volume named "myvol", and wanted to "newfs" it, you could do it like this:

# newfs /dev/vx/rdsk/myvol

or you could mount it like this:

# mount /dev/vx/dsk/myvol /myvol

Kool huh? Nothing magical. Poke around in the /dev/vx file tree and see where things are, everything is fairly well named, and self explanatory. If you're new to device trees, then just know that you can access your volumes from /dev/vx/dsk/ as though it were a normal disk.