is LVM safe for RAID-1?

Jack Howarth howarth at bromo.msbb.uc.edu
Fri Feb 23 18:08:25 UTC 2007


  I understand that LVM and RAID-1 are distinct features
but was mainly concerned about how bullet-proof LVM was
these days. Specifically, if you end up with a failed
drive does LVM ever complicate recovery. I've run into
situations were bad blocks would appear on one of the
two drives of a RAID-1 mirror and that was tricky enough
to recover from. Since I really don't need the functionality
of LVM, I'll probably skip again this time.
             Jack

On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 12:02:07PM -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 12:49:26 -0500,
>   Jack Howarth <howarth at bromo.msbb.uc.edu> wrote:
> >    I've been setting up software RAID-1 configurations
> > since Fedora Core 2 with normal partitions instead of
> > using LVM. I was wondering what the consensus was about
> > using LVM for software RAID partitions? My inclination
> > is that, unless one plans on adding additional drives
> > to the LVM partitions later, it really only adds another
> > layer of code that can break. Thanks in advance for
> > any comments.
> 
> They have orthangonal purposes, so unless you are asking if there are bugs
> in the block layer devices that support that combination, the question doesn't
> make a lot of sense.
> 
> RAID 1 gives you protection against single drive failures. If you want that
> feature, then you are going to need it regardless of whether you are using
> LVM or not.
> 
> LVM provides a way to manage how space is partitioned (and I think some
> other special features like snapshots) and if you need them, RAID 1 (or 5 or 6)
> isn't going to help you.




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