On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 08:40:54AM +0100, Rainer Krienke wrote: Content-Description: signed data > On Mittwoch, 11. Februar 2004 23:23, Avtar Gill wrote: > > This is a general question to anyone out there currently using > > LVM2 with SuSE Professional 9.0 on production servers (or > > workstations). Would you be kind enough to share your experiences > > with the rest of us? Did you experience any minor or major issues > > along the way? SuSE 9.0 ships with LVM 1.* by default but I thought > > it might be a good idea to implement new servers with LVM 2.* > > instead so upgrading to future versions of SuSE (with kernel 2.6) > > will be less of a hassle. Any thoughts or comments? > > > > We are running LVM2 on a suse8.2 system using the suse9.0 kernel (2.4.21-166). > The lvm2 utilities (version 2.2.00.05) are in this case not taken from suse > RPMs. I compiled them myself. The system (actualy 3 hosts with a total of ~3 > Hardware RAIDs, configured with raid level 5) is a NFS and SMB fileserver > with a total of 3 TBytes storage. Actually the RAIDs offer a total of ~6 TB > but we do mirroring so we can only use have of the real size. > > LVM sits on top of a md device hierachy: The hardware RAIDs are connected by > fibrechannel using 2 seperate paths from each raid array to each host across > 2 fc switches. So each host has first two multipath md devices and on top of > this it has a raid1 md device (mirror) that performs mirroring across the > raids so that even if one complete RAID should fail nothing serious will > happen. This redundency already proved quite useful since we can take one > hardware RAID out of order eg for a firmware upgrade we had to do lately > without stopping the servers in doing their job. > > The md mirror each hosts sees is used as physical volume for LVM. Here LVM2 > proved very useful since it allowed me to configure the (md) devices LVM > should scan for volumes when starting. I first tried using LVM1 in this > system, but this failed since LVM1 was confused since during scanning the > disks it saw the volumegroup and the volumes several times (probably due to > the multipath and mirroring md devices pointing to the same data) and this > lead to a complete loss of the logical volumes with all the data inside. Yes, LVM1 copes with 1 MD (eg, RAID1) stacked below it quite well. It hasn't been engineered to cope with more levels (eg, your RAID1+multipath) though. LVM2 as you pointed out, is capable to set up device name filters to cope with any such multi-level stacks avoiding access to device nodes you don't like it to access. Regards, Heinz -- The LVM Guy -- > > The filesystem in use on the local volumes is xfs. > > The system is running about 6 months now, and we did not have any trouble with > it. > > Have a nice day > Rainer > -- > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Rainer Krienke, Universitaet Koblenz, Rechenzentrum, Raum A022 > Universitaetsstrasse 1, 56070 Koblenz, Tel: +49 261287 -1312, Fax: -1001312 > Mail: krienke@uni-koblenz.de, Web: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke > Get my public PGP key: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/mypgp.html > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- *** Software bugs are stupid. Nevertheless it needs not so stupid people to solve them *** =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Heinz Mauelshagen Red Hat, Inc. Consulting Development Engineer Am Sonnenhang 11 56242 Marienrachdorf Germany Mauelshagen@RedHat.com +49 2626 141200 FAX 924446 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
