On Monday 05 March 2007, Richard Freeman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote 
about '[gentoo-amd64] LVM2 Failures':
> Does anybody know what happens if an LVM2 physical volume fails?
> Obviously any data on that physical volume is lost, and I'd imagine any
> logical volumes that reside in part or whole on that physical volume
> would be a mess.

Right on both counts (assuming you haven't mirrored those extents to a 
non-failed pv).

> What happens to logical volumes in the same volume group which do not
> reside on the lost physical volume?  Are they easily recovered?

Yes.  Simply activate your vg and lvs in partial mode (-P) and you will 
have (at least) full read access to any lvs that do not have any extents 
on the failed pv.

> How 
> about logical volumes in a different volume group - are those affected
> at all?  I didn't see any documentation on this topic on the lvm2 HOWTO.

No, vgs do not interact with one another.  All vgs without any failed pvs 
will behave completely normally.  [Well, assuming the failed disk isn't 
mucking up other things; like hanging the bus or whotnot.]

> Ideally I'd like to use lvm2 with the new drive.

LVM is nearly always a good choice, which is has been the default on 
commercial unixes for a while.

> I'm trying to avoid RAID as I have a small collection of hard drives at
> this point and in order to set up RAID I'd need to toss just about all
> of them since they're of various sizes/speeds/etc.

Ooooor....

Set up two (or 3 or 4) vgs that are roughly the same size (summed over all 
their constituent pvs).  Make a single lv on each and have all those lvs 
be the same size.  THEN, use software RAID 1 (or 5 or 6) on top of LVM.  
(I'm not sure where mirroring support is on LVM2 -- it may be a viable 
replacement for RAID 1 on top of LVM and it would simplify this setup 
greatly.)

(Linux block devices are quite flexible in how they let you (ab)use them.)

-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.                     ,= ,-_-. =. 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                      ((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy           `-'(. .)`-' 
http://iguanasuicide.org/                      \_/     
New GPG Key!  Old key expires 2007-03-25.  Upgrade NOW!

Attachment: pgpnXKfLypaUZ.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to