[CentOS] 4 X 500 gb drives - best software raid config for a backup server?

Wed Feb 18 23:20:59 UTC 2009
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Feb 18, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:12:13AM -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
>> Scott Silva wrote:
>>> You can make LVM over raid 1's in Disk Druid, but I don't think it  
>>> will do
>>> raid 10. And you cannot boot from software raid 5 (yet).
>>>
>>
>> a LVM over several raid 1's is effectively raid10 as LVM will  
>> stripe the
>> volumes across the devices.   It would be nice if  LVM could do
>> mirorring too (like LVM on AIX does) and was tighter integrated  
>> with the
>> file system tools (again, like LVM on AIX...  grow a LV and it  
>> grows the
>> JFS thats sitting on it, transparently and online).
>>
>
> Can't Linux LVM do mirroring?  I swear I read that it could in the man
> page.  Never have tried it however and you certainly can't set it up
> from disk druid in anaconda.

Lvm can do mirroring, but of requires a third drive to do mirror  
logging which  kind of defeats the whole raid1 concept, I guess if you  
have a VG of a plethora of drives this is no biggie.

And besides grub still after all these years does not support booting  
LVM volumes.

Jeez, you think with the Solaris folk able to boot off of ZFS now from  
grub we'd have  the ability to boot off of LVM by now!

-Ross