[CentOS] External Array Data Migration

Thu May 21 12:31:26 UTC 2020
Xinhuan Zheng <xzheng at christianbook.com>

Dear All,

Below question has been puzzled me for a while, and don’t know if anyone has experienced such puzzle:

You have an external array attached to a physical hardware. The operating system is CentOS 5. The file system is created on top of LVM on external array & mounted. The CentOS 5 can see the array controller, and manage all LVM configuration, etc. There is data stored in that external array. At some point, you want to upgrade the operating system to higher version, CentOS 7. Is there a fast way to migrate the external array data volume to new hardware with CentOS 7 without doing machine-to-machine rsync the whole external array data volume? In another words, can I detach external array from old hardware, and attach it to new hardware, then re-configure LVM, so new operating system can recognize the external array file system?

Thanks,

- Xinhuan