Part of the challenge I’ve outlined in the previous post is figuring out how to share the MSA1000 disk array between the two servers. Once that’s figured out - and part of it was solved by activating the fibre channel driver in the kernel - the idea is to use the Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to manage the actual available storage space on top of the MSA1000 hardware RAID. Personal notes and scribblings on the matter follow. The Linux Logical Volume Manager Logical Volume Management provides benefits in the areas of disk management and scalability. It is not intended to provide fault-tolerance or extraordinary performance. For this reason, it is often run in conjunction with RAID, which can provide both of these. Logical volume management provides a higher-level view of the disk storage on a computer system than the traditional view of disks and partitions. This gives the system administrator much more flexibility in allocating storage to applications and users. User groups can be allocated to volume groups and logical volumes and these can be grown as required. It is possible for the system administrator to “hold back” disk storage until it is required. It can then be added to the volume(user) group that has the most pressing need. When new drives are added to the system, it is no longer necessary to move users files around to make the best use of the new storage; simply add the new disk into an existing volume group or groups and extend the logical volumes as necessary. In this particular situation the idea is to use the MSA1000 hardware RAID for fault-tolerance and reliability and doing Linux LVM on top of it for creating flexible volumes.
A sample LVM topology Some usual LVM tasks for managing disk space: Initializing a disk or disk partition:
# pvcreate /dev/hda (for a disk) # pvcreate /dev/hda1 (for a partition)
Creating a volume group:
# vgcreate my_volume_group /dev/hda1 /dev/hdb1
This would create a volume group comprising both hda1 and hdb1 partitions. Activating a volume group:
# vgchange -a y my_volume_group
This is needed after rebooting the system or running vgchange -a n Removing a volume group:
# vgchange -a n my_volume_group (deactivate) # vgremove my_volume_group (remove)
Adding physical volumes to a volume group:
# vgextend my_volume_group /dev/hdc1
^^^^^^^^^ new physical volume
Removing physical volumes from a volume group:
# vgreduce my_volume_group /dev/hda1
The volume to remove shouldn’t be in use by any logical volume. Check this by using the pvdisplay <device> command. Creating a logical volume:
# lvcreate -l1500 -ntestlv testvg
This creates a new 1500MB linear LV and its block device special /dev/testvg/testlv
lvcreate -L 1500 -ntestlv testvg /dev/sdg
The same but in this case specifying the physical volume in the volume group
# lvcreate -i2 -I4 -l100 -nanothertestlv testvg
This creates a 100 LE large logical volume with 2 stripes and stripe size 4 KB. Removing a volume group: The logical volume must be closed before it can be removed:
# umount /dev/myvg/homevol # lvremove /dev/myvg/homevol
Extending and Reducing a logical volume: Detailed instructions on how to accomplish this for different underlying filesystems can be found here: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/reducelv.html In a “normal” production system it is recommended that only one PV exists on a single real disk. Reasons for this are outlined at: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/multpartitions.html Some useful external LVM resources: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/ http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/04/27/managing-disk-space-with-lvm.html http://www.gweep.net/~sfoskett/linux/lvmlinux.html