I remember seeing some mention that in the 2.6 kernels that the new LVM implementation would allow disks across multiple servers to form one logical disk. Did I understand that correctly and if so how do I use that? I have several servers on my home LAN maxed out on the number and size of disks they can handle and would really like to be able to keep all those files managed logically in one giant drive. Thanks.
I'm not sure if nbd (network block device) works as well on 2.6 as it did on 2.4, but I would think you could pretty easily use that to have LVM utilize disks on another machine. I must admit, I wouldn't do this, as it seems rather crude. At the point you're at, a fiber channel or even just external SCSI enclosure, sometimes marketted as "DAS" (Direct Attached Storage) is probably worth the money.
If it must be network based, nbd would work.
Thanks, I'm looking now to see if nbd or enhanced nbd work with 2.6.
How fault tolerant is LVM? If one of the nbd's went down would it freak up LVM? For that matter if I'm utilizing several disks on a single system as a volume and one of the disks dies or gets disconnected (in the case of an external disk) then what happens?
I have also heard of people, in lvm1, using NFS mounted loopback files as temporary snapshot storage while backing up. Sounds crazy to me!
NFS seems unreliable at best so I don't know if I'd want to use it. At time it's given me trouble dealing with multi-GB sized files.
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