Linux LVM - Is It Ready for Prime Time?

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?"

Comments

LVM and Redhat 7.3

[cvande]

I built LVM into a RH 7.3 kernel and used it for a DB2 database box. Worked great with the dell 2650 and a 1 tb powervault 220s (raid5 ...aaarrrg...) with the perc3 raid controller. It passed our rather aggressive load testing cyle, ~7 days constant load w/ a variety of different tests, (broken queries, massive table joins, etc, stuff you WOULDN'T want to see in production) and passed with flying colors. It remained in production for a little under a year until we migrated to a Oracle on Linux solution w/o LVM (RedHat AS2.1). I'd do it again in a minute if the implementation called for it.....

just my 2 cents.......

Re:Linux LVM

[bobbozzo]

And IBM's EVMS interface can run on top of LVM (http://evms.sourceforge.net/)

So the poster will be able to replace his costly IBM hardware with free IBM software. If that's not ironic, I don't know what is.