Excerpts from Stan Hoeppner's message of 2014-02-01 16:06:17 -0500:
> Yes, that's one of the beauties of LVM. However, there are other
> reasons you may not want to do this. For example, if you have allocated
> space from two different JBOD or SAN units to a single LVM volume, and
> you lack multipath connections, if you have a cable, switch, HBA, or
> other failure disconnecting one LUN that will wreak havoc on your
> mounted XFS filesystem. If you have multipath and the storage device
> disappears due to some other failure such as backplane, UPS, etc, you
> have the same problem.
Very true; I gather this would only take out any volumes which at least
partially rest on the failed device, however? As in, I don't lose the
whole volume group, correct?
> This isn't a deal breaker. There are many large XFS filesystems in
> production that span multiple storage arrays. You just need to be
> mindful of your architecture at all times, and it needs to be
> documented. Scenario: XFS unmounts due to an IO error. You're not yet
> aware an entire chassis is offline. You can't remount the filesystem so
> you start a destructive xfs_repair thinking that will fix the problem.
> Doing so will wreck your filesystem and you'll likely lose access to all
> the files on the offline chassis, with no ability to get it back short
> of some magic and a full restore from tape or D2D backup server. We had
> a case similar to this reported a couple of years ago.
Oh God, that sounds terrible. My sysadmininess is wondering why the
chassis wasn't monitored, but hindsight, etc. etc. ;-)
> If the logical sector size reported by your RAID controller is 512
> bytes, then "--dataalignment=9216s" should start your data section on a
> RAID60 stripe boundary after the metadata section.
I see that 9216s == 2608k/512b, but I'm missing something: is the
default metadata size guaranteed to be less than a single stripe, or is
there more to it?
Oh, wait, I think I just got it: '--dataalignment' will take care to
start on some multiple of 9216 sectors, regardless of the size of the
metadata section. Doy.
> The PhysicalExtentSize should probably also match the 4608KB stripe
> width, but this is apparently not possible. PhysicalExtentSize must be
> a power of 2 value. I don't know if or how this will affect XFS aligned
> write out. You'll need to consult with someone more knowledgeable of LVM.
Makes sense. If it would have an impact, then I'd probably just end up
going with RAID 0 on top of 2 or 4 RAID 6 groups, which looks like the
math would work out there.
> You bet.
Honestly, this is the most helpful and straightforward I've ever found
any project's mailing list, so kudos++.
--
Morgan Hamill
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