Veritas product overview: InfoScale, VCS, VxVM and VxFS

Updated November 2026

Veritas built its reputation on storage software for Unix servers. The products are now sold as editions of InfoScale, but administrators still use the old component names every day.

The components

Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM)

Combines disks into disk groups and volumes with mirroring, striping and RAID-5, online resizing and moving. See Volume Manager overview.

Veritas File System (VxFS)

A journalling file system with online resizing, defragmentation, snapshots and extremely large file support. See File System overview.

Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP)

Manages several paths to the same SAN disk, for failover and load balancing.

Veritas Cluster Server (VCS)

High-availability clustering: monitors applications and their resources and moves them to another server when something fails. See Cluster overview.

Cluster File System (CFS) and Cluster Volume Manager (CVM)

Let several servers mount the same file system at the same time, used for example with Oracle RAC or for fast failover.

Storage Foundation (SF)

The long-standing bundle name for VxVM plus VxFS (and DMP).

InfoScale editions

InfoScale 9.x supports Linux (RHEL, SUSE and compatible distributions), AIX, Solaris and Windows; these pages cover the Unix and Linux versions. Check the hardware and software compatibility lists on SORT for your exact operating system level before upgrading either the OS or InfoScale.

Licensing

Old versions used licence keys installed with vxlicinst (or vxlicense on very old releases), and an expired evaluation key could stop the products from starting even when valid keys were present. In 2026 InfoScale moved to term-based subscription licences: licence files that end with the subscription and are enforced after a 60-day grace period, delivered with updates for InfoScale 7.4.2 and later from May 2026 (the Unix updates followed in mid-2026). Permanent keys and keyless licensing are being retired. See the InfoScale licence enforcement FAQ for what happens on your version.

vxlicrep                                 # report installed licences and their expiry
vxkeyless display                        # keyless licences still in use (older setups)
/opt/VRTS/install/installer -license     # install a licence on all nodes
vxlicinst -k KEY                         # install a licence key (older versions)

Before any maintenance, run vxlicrep and look for expiry dates. Term licences always have an end date: renew before it passes.

Agents

VCS knows how to start, stop and monitor resources through agents. Bundled agents cover IP addresses, network cards, disk groups, volumes, mounts, processes and applications. Separately installed agents exist for databases (Oracle, Db2, SAP HANA, PostgreSQL), SAP, web servers and replication products. Every resource type in main.cf corresponds to an agent.