Version 1.0 of Online: DiskSuite was released as an add-on product for SunOS in late 1991; the product has undergone significant enhancements over the years. SVM has been included as a standard part of the Solaris Operating System since Solaris 8 was released in February 2000.
SVM is similar in functionality to later software volume managers such as FreeBSD vinum, allowing metadevices (virtual disks) to be concatenated, striped or mirrored together from physical ones. It also supports soft partitioning, dynamic hotsparing, and growing metadevices. The mirrors support dirty region logging (DRL, called resync regions in DiskSuite) and logging support for RAID-5.
The ZFS file system, added to Solaris in 2006, has its own integrated volume management capabilities, but SVM will continue to be included with Solaris for use with other file systems.