Topic: How to merge 2 ide hard drives?

[Bill]

I have a sme box with a scsi main drive and a pair of ide drives for storage. I would like to combine the ide drives to appear as one large drive. Is this possible? I suspect its part of raid but I am not familiar with setting one up.

TIA,

Bill

[Boris]

I think the feature you are looking for is LVM (Logical Volume Management).
I don't think it is included with SME as it requires special kernel configuration and utilities to manage it.
Some hardware RAID subsystems provide the same posibilities. Look for ACCUSYS 7500 or similar.

[Brad]

Bill,

Did you have any luck with setting up your RAID array?  If you have, I would really like to know.

I just purchased a PCI 'Raid-Rocket 133' for my 6.0beta3 server.

I had to print the 'R-R 133'linux manual, but it is only documented for RedHat
version 8.
A quick search of the forms show SME 6.0b3 is based on RedHat version 7.3

Can anyone shed some light as to where I can get more information on installing
SME on a hard dive attached to a RAID card?

[Tom Keiser]

Brad asked:

>Can anyone shed some light as to where I can get more information on >installing SME on a hard dive attached to a RAID card?


Generally, you will attach >1 hard drive to a RAID card, depending on which level of RAID you want to implement.

Secondly, while my ignorance isn't relevant, I've never heard of this RAID card. You are going to need a driver to run it under SME. If the Rocket Raid people provide source code, you or someone on these forums will be able to compile that driver. But if they only provide binary driver files, you are almost certainly out of luck, unless the driver happens to be included in the Linux kernel.

Adaptec SCSI RAID controllers, and atapi controllers from 3ware have drivers included in the kernels used by SME. Some users have gotten controllers with highpoint chipsets installed, and some claim to have Promise controllers working, but I can't vouch for either.

Best bet is to stick with what is known to work.

Good luck,

Tom

[Brad]

Thank-you very much, Tom.

You have given my very useful information, and inspired me to continue
researching RAID support for the SME server.

I am going to create a new topic in 'Experienced' user forum that is not specific to this topic, but RAID in gerneral. I might do this in a day or two if I can not figure out how to re-complile a kernel.  

So thanks again, Tom.

--Brad D.

[Jeff Peters]

Has anyone been successful setting up LVM (logical volume manager)?

I'm running (kernel 2.4+) SME6.0b3 and have current three disk drives of various sizes but would like to combine them to one drive partition -- LVM seems to be the method to use.

The fdisk command did allow me to re id two partitions to LVM volumes but I'm having trouble installing pvcreate to take it to the next step.

Any successful attempts from anyone?

Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous]

Any success with this ? Howto maybe ?

[Anonymous]

Any success with this ? Howto maybe ?

For LVM (Logical Volume Management) try
http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/LVM-HOWTO/
http://www.sistina.com/lvm \

No need for a RAID hardware.

[jpeters]

A recent situation called for a reinstall of my SME6 box and setting up Logical Volume Management (LVM) so I decided to keep notes of my efforts in case someone should ever need it.

There are plenty of HOWTOs on the web, use your favorite search engine to find it. These HOWTOs give much more detail and options and I encourage you to read it first.

The standard disclaimer warning, use at your own risk etc ad nauseum.

I have 3 drives on my system, one 200g and two 40g drives.  I wanted to use the two smaller drives as (rsync) backups to the larger one. I could have feasibly made all three as one LVM volume but I didn’t. SME6 was already installed on the 200g drive.

1.   first I fdisked the two smaller drives  

# fdisk /dev/hdf  
(created primary partition numbered 1, and gave it the LVM id  which is 8e and did the same to the second drive /dev/hdg.)  I don’t recall why my system used f & g as partition names instead of b & c etc.

2.   created a volume descriptor area by using the command

# pvcreate  /dev/hdf
# pvcreate /dev/hdg

3.   created a volume group

# vgcreate vg /dev/hdf  /dev/hdg
‘vg’ can be whatever you want to name it. I felt vg for volume group was easy to remember.

4.   To identify the volume group (vg) I used

# vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name                 vg
VG Access                read/write
VG Status                available/resizable
VG #                     0
MAX LV                   256
Cur LV                   1
Open LV                  1
MAX LV Size              255.99 GB
Max PV                   256
Cur PV                   2
Act PV                   2
VG Size                  75.44 GB
PE Size                  4 MB
Total PE                 19313
Alloc PE / Size          19200 / 75 GB
Free  PE / Size          113 / 452 MB
VG UUID                  690gGz-nIIC-mtm0-bgJa-18Ut-EXlf-VCalpx

Other than seeing that everything appears good, I see that the volume group (vg) max size will be approximately 75Gig.

5.   Next I created the logical volume that I named ‘lv’  (lv = logical volume)

# lvcreate –L75G –nlv vg
output shows
   lvcreate -- doing automatic backup of “vg”
   lvcreate – logical volume “/dev/vg/lv” successfully created

note no space in command between –n and lv. The 75 value created a 75 gig volume space spanning two 40g drives.

6.   To create an ext2 file system on the logical volume I used

#  mke2fs /dev/vg/lv
the output should be self explanatory

7.   Next I created a LVM directory in /mnt with mkdir /mnt/LVM & then mounted this volume I with

# mount  /dev/vg/lv /mnt/LVM

8.   Finally you can test the results using

# df

9.   Lastly you will need to setup the system to mount this drive at boot up. For some unknown reason I didn’t find success using /etc/fstab so I placed the following in /etc/rc.d/rc.local file

/sbin/vgscan
/sbin/vgchange –a y
mount /dev/vg/lv /mnt/LVM


Good luck,
Jpeters

[jpeters]

There's always something to forget.

You will need to install the LVM rpm as it is not included with SME.

Do a search of lvm-1.0.3-4.i386.rpm on the web and install with "rpm -ivh lvm-1.0.3-4.i386.rpm"

Note, the kernel version for SME6 already supports use of LVM so no compiling should be necessary. I cannot confirm if this is true for earlier versions of SME.

Enjoy,
Jpeters