Stephen Harris wrote:
On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 03:05:30PM -0400, Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
Stephen Harris wrote:
Or you could just boot from a LiveCD of a distro that was this and run a conversion there, it would make it unavailable during the conversion though.
*grin* My first email on this subject...
I wonder if I could boot off a Ubuntu CD or something and grow the array that way. Would be annoying (many hours of server downtime)...
I wouldn't use Ubuntu or any Debian based distro cause it's EVMS just might bugger up the LVM config...
Try Fedora or OpenSuse they use straight LVM.
If the array was part of a LVM VG, you could create another 4 drive array and add it to the VG and extend the LVs that way, or do a pvmove and move everything from the old array to the new.
Well, it _is_... the old array was 4*500Gb. The new array is 5*1Tb. In each I've built a single VG/LV. But my machine can't handle 9 SATA disks (power, controller limitations, space). So what I did was use one of the TByte disks to copy the data, built the other 4 into an array, copied the data from the last disk onto the array and then... failed to extend the array.
I still have the old 4*500GB on a shelf, but I don't have anything I can plug it into.
(My other option is to buy a couple of SATA controllers, build a second machine then transfer data over the network)
Instead of a second machine, how about an external disk enclosure?
You can get them rack mountable or tower based. Look for a nice 15 drive enclosure, then you have room to build 2 arrays...
A nice hardware RAID card with battery backed cache would make the arrays scream too, for RAID5/6 I always go hardware with BBU Cache. I almost always do the OS disks as software RAID1.
Hey with the enclosure going you can use the internal drives for volume snapshots and be able to keep quite a few without killing the storage performance.
-Ross
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