LVM and RAID

[Matthew Carpenter]

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Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

> I have just been playing with Linux LVM and am quite impressed. It
> seems too simple. At least when set up from SUSE 9.2. I have a few
> questions for anyone who has worked with this:
>
> 1. Are there any gotchas when using a LVM on different distros?
> Aside from the fact that the config may be different? Anything in
> the LVM itself? If I set up a LVM on, say, SUSE, and later move to
> something else (I am not considering this - but I want to know),
> could I expect difficulties?
>
> 2. Can I set up a LVM that is also RAID? That is, having a file
> system with oodles of storage is fine, but what about failure
> protection?

LVM rocks!  So far, I've found the following to be true (possibly not
for all distros):

* SWAP belongs on a real partition, particularly if you have a laptop
you want to do software suspend.
* You can boot off everything LVM'ed (possibly even /boot), so long as
the appropriate initrd exists (which SuSE creates automagically) or
the kernel has it built in.
* On SuSE, you can combine LVM and RAID1 without recompiling. There's
a process to it, but it's quite cool once you understand it.  RAID1
first, then LVM on top of that.
* There are two different toolsets to do RAID.  mdadm is the newer,
friendlier version.
* Partitions which are set to auto-raid (md) can be used as RAID
without requiring a configuration file.

- --
Matthew Carpenter
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

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