Quote:
Originally Posted by AstralTraveller
Thanks Gary. I hadn't considered LVM. It looks very powerful and should do the job but at the moment the learning curve looks quite steep. What advantages would it have over 'mdadm'?
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Hi David,
Ignoring RAID for one moment and just concentrating on LVM, that in itself
provides the potential advantage of abstracting your storage and having
"virtual partitions" that you can more easily expand or shrink.
These days, personally, I tend not to create many partitions. But for
example if you have ever created say a /tmp partition and later on wished
you had made it bigger or smaller, then LVM makes that a lot easier to do.
If you were just going to use the mirrored disks as one big partition,
then there is no compelling reason I can think of to use LVM.
However, if you do use LVM then the ability to create a mirrored volume
is in-built into the lvcreate command, so it then means you don't have
to use mdadm.
It's been probably three years since I last did it and as you know
things can change rapidly so I would recommend an additional Google
first before going down the LVM path and using it to do the mirroring.
I'd hate to give you a bum steer.
In looking at my own notes, you can't put the /boot partition under
LVM because the GRUB boot loader won't be able to read it.
In notes to myself, I recorded the following :-
In the event of RAID disk mirror failure -
See
https://access.redhat.com/site/docum...or_create.html
See also
https://access.redhat.com/site/docum...or_repair.html
See also /etc/lvm/lvm.conf
In the event of a RAID failure it will be reported in the syslog and a manual lvconvert --repair will have to be instigated
The above two references would not be the most up to date but might
provide a starting point for your further consideration.
Linux and Raids
.
. I use Linux Mint but I also have OpenSuSE installed on a separate partition in case Mint falls over. And it has been useful. So, if I have mdadm installed on both OSes can they both access and read/write to the array? I can find plenty of articles on allowing Windows and Linux to access an array but nothing about two flavours of Linux. Since the superblock is common across Linux I think it should work. Does anyone know for sure?
