[CentOS] Some basic LVM questions

Sun Nov 8 23:39:17 UTC 2009
Dave Stevens <geek at uniserve.com>

Quoting Monte Milanuk <memilanuk at gmail.com>:

> M. Hamzah Khan wrote:
>> On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 10:44 -0800, Monte Milanuk wrote:
>>
>> What I think most people do (and what I am doing now), is to setup
>> RAID-1 or so behind the volume group. This way you will still be safe if
>> one of the drives fail. Keep in mind that RAID is not a backup solution,
>> and you should still create regular backups. :)
>>
>
> In practical terms, it may all be a moot point.  I'm not too sure how
> much more I can jam in that mini-tower case without other problems, and
> (hopefully) 500GB should be enough storage for now; intended usage is
> just backing up users home directories from a few PCs & laptops in the
> house.  If I truly intend to implement LVM + RAID it may have to be in a
> newer dedicated setup.  I think for the time being though, I will look
> at removing the 500gb drive from the first volume group and creating a
> second one with just it in there.  Who knows, I might get brave and
> start mucking about w/ software raid and see what I can put together ;)
>
> I know everyone says RAID is not substitute for a proper backup
> solution... but this machine *is* the backup for the rest of the
> network.  At what point should one draw the line for backing up?  What
> is there out there that is still reasonably economical for backing up
> say, a RAID 1 setup of two 1TB drives, or a RAID 5 setup of three drives
> that size?  Tape?  Looks to be just about out-stripped in size by cheap
> hard drives, at least in anything even remotely in my price range.  NAS
> - which is probably going to have its own version of RAID?

well, I'm dealing with this right now, I've taken delivery of a pile  
of parts that will be a new server Real Soon Now (TM). The four 750  
drives will be a sw RAID 0+1 array with striping for performance and  
mirroring for redundancy. There will be an identical 5th drive in the  
box and not connected as a spare for 1 drive failure. Then there will  
be an off-site 1.5T in another box doing rsync as the last line of  
backup. The reason for sw raid is that I get to use eight opteron  
cores rather than the dinky cpu on a raid card and that I don't need  
to be concerned that a replacement raid controller might have a  
different BIOS than the one I started with.

HTH

Dave



> Thanks,
>
> Monte
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