One thing that separates VERITAS from other volume managers is its integration with the host operating system. VERITAS actually utilizes kernel modules, which are the backbone of the application. You can see some of the driver loads in /etc/system. You'll see several driver forceloads. This is important to note because on most systems you'll see "WARNING: Forceload of dev/XXX Failed!" messages at boot up. Don't worry about these, it just means that VERITAS is trying to load a driver for a piece of hardware you don't have.

I wanted to talk about VERITAS Installation, but I'm going to leave that to the book, but be VERY careful on VERITAS and Solaris upgrades to a system using VERITAS. Remember that because VERITAS uses kernel modules, that if you should wipe out and/or replace the kernel you could loose VERITAS.... which means you'll get a very intimate session alone with the books and the system while you learn how to recover botched VERITAS installations. Please, be informed about this, I've killed a couple machines this way, and luckily they were all "test" machines and not production servers.

VERITAS also has several daemons running all the time to keep watch over your volumes, and to ensure smooth operation. To look for them try typing "ps -ef | grep vx" on a machine running VERITAS. You generally will see 3 common daemons, which are:

Maybe, by now your asking "Hurry up, just tell me where the VERITAS configuration file is!". Whelp, there isn't one! Everything we do to VERITAS is watch by the vxconfigd. The vxconfigd then updates VERITAS's object database, and keeps watching. As for the other daemons, they are pretty self explanatory. Vxiod makes sure that data is written to the volume the way it's supposed to be (so if the volume is striped, vxiod makes sure the data is written to the stripe the way we told it too, etc..). Vxrelocd just looks for disk failures and if it finds one it puts a spare (if there is one) in it's place.