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Gordon Henderson wrote: > > So I'm putting together a small "High Availability" setup for a client > for a project they're running. It's a LAMPy type of server, so nothing > special there and it'll be 2 servers running MySQL replication and > Linux HA between then - again, nothing special there. > > But one thing I'm pondering over - 2 disks in each server or just one? > > <SNIP> Hi Gordon, >>From the sound of it - although each server is effectively a mirror of the other, ie no unique data on each - /I/ would feel very uncomfortable not RAID'ing a production server, especially a remote one. Does this customer really require 1TB drives, or could you balance the cost of slightly smaller capacity and use 2? Personally, I quite like the thought of getting an impending doom email, "member failed in array" - rather than the server just not responding to ping, or other Nagios etc' failure. Further, from my experience, some drives appear fine - but tend to 'fail' when the server is rebooted, therefore having RAID gives that extra security blanket of both servers failing in the same timeframe. I would think the advantage of rebuilding time of a failed node would be significantly reduced, and depending on the support contract you have with this customer, it could work out cheaper for them (and less hassle for you), to 'fix' the server by inserting a replacement HD, rather than reinstalling the OS and re-mirroring configuring from the surviving node. The other aspect is, I would entrust many people to replace a hard drive - especially data centre staff. Often you can get some data centres to do this kind of work for you. Paying a data centre chap the going rate, and drop shipping a hard drive to the centre - can be well worth saving a 8-10 hour round trip! In the end, let the customer have it there way - but I would advise RAID'ing any proper server. Kind Regards, Dave Walker -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html