D&C Lug - Home Page
Devon & Cornwall Linux Users' Group

[ Date Index ][ Thread Index ]
[ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] LVM2 and Software Raid (And also Gentoo)



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hatton, Peter wrote:
|
| Anyway, I was saying earlier I intend to upgrade the P233 server box, my
| intention is to have pair of new hard discs and mirror them using software
| raid.  But I can't see how I can use LVM2 and Software raid together?
 Is it
| possible?

The HOWTO seems to suggest building RAID 1 or RAID 1/0 arrays, and them
placing the /dev/mdX devices under LVM.

I don't recall this being how it was done on the LVM2 presentation I
went to - but since I used to run HP-UX LVM on hardware RAID it seems
not an unreasonable approach.

In these scenarios I think the root device is usually /dev/md0, i.e. a
RAID 1 pair (or more), and not under LVM.

Then disks of the same types - a selection of RAID 1/0 arrays - are
placed in a vgraid1 - and you allocate your requirement for RAID space
from this volume group.

Whilst I was very impressed with the LVM2 tools, unless you are handling
a lot of disks, or have keen high availability requirements (i.e. down
time is not an option when adding/adjusting storage), it is overkill.

In most such scenarios you'd be using hardware RAID arrays - as most
PC's (including servers) just don't have room for the number of disks to
justify the use.

Even the 20 disk HP-UX box I did most of my RAID fun on had virtually
all these disks configured as 4 logical devices (2 x RAID 5, 2 x RAID 1)
and so could have been reasonably managed without LVM - although since
it was available it was used. For stupid historical reasons most of
these arrays were in one volume group, and logical volumes were forced
to use specific "physical"(read RAID array) disks at creation time.

These days I would just configure a selection of RAID 1/0 arrays, and
stick them all in one volume group - ala SAME (striping and mirroring
everywhere). The magic if any done in the file system mounting options
on the logical volumes - where filesystems are needed/preferred.

Although these days your high end hardware RAID devices will probably
suggest you let them deal with such grubby details as how to store and
where to store data to disk, and they will probably do it better than
you could and tune it as it discovers how the disks are used.

Come back tldp.org all is forgiven...
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Using GnuPG with Debian - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFA4fkRGFXfHI9FVgYRArRMAJ9Y6o3U08jw+L3HCwDNF3Ukme7WsQCbBtLZ
uu9IwjMbrZ9aewvIod0Ht5g=
=hnQY
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the
message body to unsubscribe.



Lynx friendly