Volume Manager Overview

physical objects

Volume Manager uses two physical objects: physical disks and partitions. Partitions are created on the physical disks (on systems that use partitions).

virtual objects

Volume Manager creates virtual objects, called volumes. Each volume records and retrieves data from one or more physical disks. Volumes are accessed by a file system, a database, or other applications in the same way that physical disks are accessed. Volumes are also composed of other virtual objects that are used to change the volume configuration. Volumes and their virtual components are called virtual objects.