LVM + RAID follow up

[john.abreau at zuken.com (John Abreau)]

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 10:54 -0500, Rich Braun wrote:

> I gather what you're suggesting is to install the new drives simultaneous with
> the old, and issuing the commands you've cited to do a single transfer of each
> of the two md devices, then pulling the old drives?  Sounds like a pretty
> powerful argument in favor of LVM.

Yup, that's basically it. The nice thing about doing it at the LVM 
instead of rsync'ing everything is that it's below the filesystem 
level. So even with the filesystem live, with processes actively 
reading and writing files, the filesystem can be moved transparently 
off the old disks and onto the new ones. Of course you want good 
backups "just in case", before you try this,  but the few times I've
done this, it all worked smoothly. 

Granted I've always used RAID-1 for my components, so I was only 
swapping two disks at a time; replacing a RAID-5 like this 
presumably would be more complicated down at the RAID level. 

-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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