lvm or lvm2?
I am in the process of planning out a medium sized server (500 users, 500GB) to host user accounts in our school district. I will be using Samba...
Do you think using LVM is a reliable method of sharing home directories? I have been reading the lists, and I notice that in a lot of cases, if one drive dies, you usually lose a lot of information.
If so, should I be looking at LVM or LVM2? I haven't seen a comparison sheet on what 2 offers over the standard...
Thanks for your help.
Signature · 4 lines
Matthew Daubenspeck http://www.oddprocess.org 14:26:00 up 1 day, 5:44, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
Quoted 3 lines · Matthew Daubenspeck
Do you think using LVM is a reliable method of sharing home directories? I have been reading the lists, and I notice that in a lot of cases, if one drive dies, you usually lose a lot of information.
That's why you should really only use it on top of redundant storage like RAID 1 or RAID 5, or in situations where you can afford the risk of data loss (scratch volumes, hot archives, etc).
I guess that by its self, LVM could be seen as having many of the same issues as RAID-0 in terms of data safety - but you're more likely to be able to do partial recovery with LVM.
I run LVM on a RAID 1 array and a large RAID 5 array, and while I've had disk failures, I've never suffered any data loss because the layer below LVM is properly redundant.
Craig Ringer
Quoted 5 lines · Matthew Daubenspeck
Quoted 4 lines
Do you think using LVM is a reliable method of sharing home directories? I have been reading the lists, and I notice that in a lot of cases, if one drive dies, you usually lose a lot of information.
Quoted 3 lines · Craig Ringer
That's why you should really only use it on top of redundant storage like RAID 1 or RAID 5, or in situations where you can afford the risk of data loss (scratch volumes, hot archives, etc).
I agree that RAID 5 is a great idea for important data and is the appropriate layer under LVM for the redundancy that large numbers of home directories demand.
Quoted 3 lines
I guess that by its self, LVM could be seen as having many of the same issues as RAID-0 in terms of data safety - but you're more likely to be able to do partial recovery with LVM.
This probably assumes multiple disks in a single volume group.
The following would be appropriate to a single person workstation:
Although it reduces the flexibility of LVM, creating a volume group per disk has the advantage that a disk becoming bad loses only the logical volumes that were on that disk.
I find that this works great for Sun workstations which have two internal SCA drives. A single SCA drive can be swapped between machines easily since each drive "is" its own volume group. Of course I allocate only a single large partition to a volume group.
Sincerely,
Ken Fuchs <[email protected]>