Is it possible to run an OCFS2 file system on top of Linux software RAID? Here is my situation. I have four identical disk chassis that perform hardware RAID internally. Each chassis has a pair of fiber channel ports, and I can assign the same LUN to both ports. I want to connect all of these chassis to two Linux systems. I want the two Linux systems to share a file system that is striped across all four chassis for performance. I know I can use software RAID (mdadm) to do RAID-0 striping across the four chassis on a single machine; I have tried this, it works fine, and the performance is tremendous. I also know I can use OCFS2 to create a single filesystem on a single chassis that is shared between my two Linux systems. What I want is to combine these two things. Suse's documentation (http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles11/stor_admin/?page=/documentation/sles11/stor_admin/data/raidyast.html) says: "IMPORTANT:Software RAID is not supported underneath clustered file systems such as OCFS2, because RAID does not support concurrent activation. If you want RAID for OCFS2, you need the RAID to be handled by the storage subsystem." Because my disk chassis already perform hardware RAID-5, I only need Linux to do the striping (RAID-0) in software. So for me, there is no issue about "which node should rebuild the RAID" etc. I understand that Linux md stores meta-data on the partitions and is not cluster aware, but will this create problems for OCFS2 even if it is just RAID 0? Has anybody tried something like this? Are there alternative RAID-0 solutions for Linux that would be expected to work? Thank you. - Pat -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
