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Re: RAID

Subject: Re: RAID
From: Phillip Susi
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 14:24:56 -0500
Anders Karlsson wrote:
I really want to read the documentation that details how to set up
RAID5 with just LVM2, so please post links to that documentation. I
can not find them at all, but am very interested in how they do it.
Similarly, I can not find any documentation on how to do RAID1 with
just LVM2, so if you have links for that as well, they would be
appreciated.


Hrm... I just checked and it looks like there is NOT yet a raid5 module for the device mapper, only linear, stripe, mirror, and snapshot. I am not very familliar with the lvm utility programs, but I'm sure that it exports the functionality availible in the underlying device mapper.

I did locate one interesting document about device mapper being
"capable of mapping block devices in various ways (eg. linear,
striped, mirrored)" by Heinz Mauelshagen. The tool dmraid is required
for this, much like mdadm is required for managing MD devices.


dmraid is a utility that scans physical drives for the parameter block that the bios for hardware fakeraids writes to the disk, then configures the device mapper to access the raid volume. LVM uses metadata stored on the disk in a different way, but also configures the kernel device mapper to access the volumes. You can directly manipulate the device mapper with the dmsetup command.

It may be that device mapper will take over from MD at some point in
the future, but that seems a long way off considering the disparity in
capabilities.


Right now it looks like the only features md offers that dm does not are raid5 and raid6. My guess is those will be forthcoming soon.


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