[DRBD-user] LVM on DRBD on LVM

James McTavish jmctavish at matrixorbital.ca
Tue Jul 12 05:02:42 CEST 2005

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


I've got an interesting situation that I'm hoping someone out there  
can help me with.  Currently our file server uses LVM on top of a  
RAID setup.  However we would like to mirror everything to the second  
server to get higher availability.

In the first scenario I've considered using DRBD on top of LVM.  This  
makes for a tedious task, as every file share has its own LVM logical  
volume.  This would mean that I would have to mirror several  
partitions across, and each time a new share is created, I'd have to  
mirror it too.  This situation is not the best in terms of ease of  
management.

The second scenario puts LVM on top of DRBD.  This makes it much  
easier to create LVM logical volumes.  However it makes the other end  
of management more difficult.  The two servers require both mirrored  
and unmirrored space.  When I add drives to the server later, I would  
like the option to contribute their space to either or both pools of  
space.

The ideal would be to run LVM on top of DRBD on top of LVM.  This way  
I could create one central pool of space from all the drives.  This  
would be divided into logical volumes.  One of which could be  
mirrored to the other machine.  Then another LVM volume could be  
created using that mirrored space as a physical volume, which could  
in turn be made into other logical volumes.

My question is, is this possible given the current state of LVM and  
DRBD?  Or is there another way that eases the management of both ends?

--
-James




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