On 1/17/2012 2:51 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
> frankly, I'd temporarily hang a 1TB drive on that thing, format it as
> a simple volume, and backup your file systems to it, that raid is a
> *MESS*. It would make much more sense to have 1 partition on each
> physical disk be a member of the MD raid5, then put that md in the
> volgroup, rather than having 9 sets of raids, I can only imagine they
> did it the way they did due to limitations of that ancient linux
> kernel in RH Linux 7.x (early Kernel 2.4, I believe). but, a newer
> linux kernel should see those md volumes, and should be able to import
> the LVM VG on them, if you really want to keep it intact.
While I absolutely agree that it's a mess, there was a reason to
the madness I'm sure. I think originally they were thinking smaller
volume sizes which are then raided in mirror mode, so when a drive
fails, only a small slice of data would fail. This is all theoretical
on my part.
The interesting this is, there's a CentOS 5.7 (Final) system in the
mix that's also setup the same exact way. The F7 is merely a mirror
backup of the CentOS machine. (I realized it's not an RH7, but Fedora
7, running kernel 2.6.23.17-88.fc7.)
Either way, I do think a rebuild is in order, if only to simplify
the raid ... I think what I'm going to do is upgrade the mirror system
first after rebuilding the raid, mirror the main system, then swap
machines while I then address the main one, which is running CentOS.
Once that's back up and running, swap them back because the CentOS
system is actually the larger, more powerful one (8 cores versus 2 cores
on the mirror system.)