Interesting discussion in other threads got me wondering whether I should have made some other choices when setting up my vtape environment. Particularly whether I should have used LVM (Logical Volume Management) to create one large filesystem covering my multiple dedicated disks.
Its a topic I do not recall being discussed, pros & cons. Let me describe my current vtape environment as a starting point. I have 6 hard drives dedicated to vtapes, 3x3TB and 3x4TB, 21TB total. I have 240 vtapes of 100GB (0.1TB) allocated. That works out to 11-12 vtapes/TB. When I first set things up, I did not like the idea of one drive having all consecutive vtapes meaning it would exclusively be used for about a month and not used again for about 4 months. Instead I allocated blocks of 8-12 vtapes on one drive and the next block on the next drive ... In part I felt on drive failure, it would minimize my loss exposure of recent backups to about a week rather than a month. I wonder whether I might have instead just pooled the six drives into one logical volume and not worry about specific allocation ov vtapes to specific drives. Hmmm, 21TB filesystem, hell of a beast to fsck ;) Has anyone used LVM for their vtapes? Positive or negative results to report? Jon -- Jon H. LaBadie j...@jgcomp.com 11226 South Shore Rd. (703) 787-0688 (H) Reston, VA 20190 (703) 935-6720 (C)
