The downside to MD/LVM vs a good raid controller is the caching. Hardware raid while is infact vendor specific offers battery backed ram as a read and write buffer. For spinning disk you’ll get more than twice the performance on a good raid controller.
All that to say if you don’t need performance, LVM is my preference. Even if I had a raid controller I would still run LVM on the linux host. Infact we ran LVM on every linux box (> 600vms) at my last place. It gives you the ability to resize partitions live and resize2fs lets you grow the filesystem in top of it. In retrospect, I run MD at my home nas, I only have 4 sata ports and I was running 4x 4TB and I wanted to upgrade them all to 6TB. It was a painful process to say the least. I ran into md format (version) limits on bigger drives, superblock issues, all in all it took me about 3 weeks to finally get all the drives migrates over (1 drive out, after rebuild, 1 drive in, rebuild, repeat) it would have been about 4 days to do that on LVM. Another benefit to LVM is snapshots! You can backup mysql in production by locking then flushing tables, lvm snapshot then release the lock. All that happens in under a second. (Way better than VSS for mssql) My 2 cents. Steve Wakham -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
