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Linux LVM - Is It Ready for Prime Time?

Posted by Cliff on from the hoping-it-won't-fall-over-under-load dept.

Deagol asks: "I'd like to replace our aging IBM server with a commodity solution (Linux, 3Ware cards, and lots of IDE drives). The main reason is price (the cost of 5 36GB SCSI disks for this sucker -- one of which died today -- could pay for the replacement server with 2TB of usable space after RAID-5. Being a huge fan of AIX's LVM,I've recently been playing with the Linux version of LVM. It's got all the right features (and even the ability to shrink logical volumes, a feature which AIX 4.3.3 doesn't have!), though the commands aren't as polished as the AIX counterparts. The big question for me is, will it stand up and be stable under heavy load, like the IBM does? Is anyone running Linux LVM on a 1TB+, 24/7 production machine?"

4 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Why the pricey replacement drive? by Glonoinha · · Score: 2, Interesting

    -The main reason is price (the cost of 5 36GB SCSI disks for this sucker -- one of which died today --

    Odds are the drives are OEM versions of a very popular drive vendor, perhaps pop it out, figure what kind of drive it is, buy a new one that is an exact match (or better yet, buy five new ones of exactly the same type) and replace them yourself for +/- $2,000 total) and restore from your backup. Maybe this is a little oversimplified but if it is a RS/6000 box odds are it uses regular ol' SCSI drives.

    --
    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  2. Yeah, sort of. by Lukey+Boy · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'm running a huge ReiserFS slab of space over an LVM IDE cluster using cheap drives and Promise cards, and it's perfect - totally stable and the box has lots of traffic with uptime approaching 6 months.

    But, it's looking as if the LVM code isn't actually included in the 2.5/2.6 series of kernel (I could be wrong). If you plan on upgrading to this eventually, stay away from LVM. If you don't care just dive in.

  3. The only thing that scares me about Linux LVM by devphil · · Score: 4, Interesting


    is that they keep replacing it and reimplementing it in the kernel.

    The one linked to in the article (Sistina's) is in 2.4. I'm using it at home, and I like it. We're considering using it at work, but I hear rumours that 2.6 will contain Something Completely Different (Again), which annoys me.

    --
    You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
  4. I'm using it in several places by tzanger · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The mail spool for a 15k-user ISP in southwestern Ontario is running on Slack9 + LVM (Reiserfs). It exports the spool via NFS and the edge servers (SMTP+IMAP4+POP3, virus+spamscan) mount the spool directly over ipsec. No issues. I can grow the filesystem, take snapshots and it all just works. The PostgreSQL database is also on an LVM volume, but I haven't had to do much with it related to LVM yet, as pg_dump works live.

    I have a number of other mail spools for businesses around the area (probably a half dozen to 10 or so) -- around 100-300 users each. Same story, backups are very nice when you can just take a snapshot.

    I'm currently evaluating Appgen Custom Suite as a replacement for our current Accpac and Misys accounting and inventory/manufacturing infrastructure. LVM is very nice here for growing the db partition and snapshotting means the system is only down for seconds instead of the time it'd take to dump the entire db to tape.

    All in all, I am very pleased with LVM. I do all my LVM on software RAID1 or hardware RAID5, but there's been no interaction or badness show up so far. I realize it's possible to do RAID1 with LVM but there's no documentation on how to "un-fail" the volume after a drive fails or how to manage it, so until then md or the hardware tools will have to do. :-)