On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Les Mikesell wrote: > Stuart D. Gathman wrote: > > > > Those with money to burn seem to favor SANs. (And cloning a PV with > > a SAN and importclone is an easy solution to the OP problem - if only they > > had > > a SAN.) I'm part of the Po' Fo'k contingent. > > Is a SAN something you can emulate with an iscsi target on fairly normal > equipment? It depends on the software on the SAN server having something like a snapshot or mirroring facility available. At its simplest level, a SAN server can be just a disk accessed by iSCSI or ATAoE. (And even I can afford that.) But high end SAN servers are LVM systems (using something like ZFS) and clients attach to logical drives that can be cloned, snapshotted, etc. Kind of moves the whole LVM layer to the disk subsystem (although it is still useful to have an additional LVM layer locally). More people people buying high end SAN servers might have kept Sun from getting bought by Oracle :-) A high end SAN server means you allocate "disks" from the SAN instead of buying physical disks. Adding another "disk" to a server can be as simple as allocating another "LV" (or whatever the SAN software calls it) and attaching it. The OP would simply clone his disk in the SAN (and needn't worry about the duplicate VGID as long he doesn't attach the clone) before doing the upgrade. I have one client with a SAN system, and it seems to perform well. It is one client that never needs to install a physical disk on a server I maintain for them. (Caveat, booting from iSCSI requires bringing up a Nic - which is tricky to do for linux in initrd.) -- Stuart D. Gathman <stuart@bmsi.com> Business Management Systems Inc. Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154 "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" - background song for a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial. _______________________________________________ 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/