One cool feature that is built into VxFS is the ability to preallocate files sequentially on disk. This capability can benefit sequential workloads, and will typically result in higher throughput since disk seek times are minimized (LBA addressing, disk drive defect management and storage array abstractions can sometimes obscure this, so this may not always be 100% accurate).
To use the VxFS preallocation features, a file first needs to be created:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=oradata01.dbf count=2097152
2097152+0 records in
2097152+0 records out
In this example, I created a 1GB file (2097152 blocks 512-bytes per block gives us 1GB) named oradata01.dbf, and double checked that it was 1GB by running ls with the “-h” option:
$ ls -lh
total 3.1G -rw-r–r– 1 root root 1.0G Aug 25 09:06 oradata01.dbf
After a file of the correct size has been allocated, the setext utility can be used to reserve blocks for that file, and to create an extent that matches the number of blocks allocated to the file:
$ setext -r 2097152 -e 2097152 oradata01.dbf
To verify the settings that were assigned to the file, the getext utility can be used:
$ getext oradata01.dbf
oradata01.dbf: Bsize 1024 Reserve 2097152 Extent Size 2097152
This is an awesome feature, and yet another reason why VxFS is one of the best file systems available today!