XFS + LVM Root fs questions

[Kai Leibrandt <k_leibrandt@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if I could get some general feelings from people 
with experience with xfs on top of lvm2 (pref. on top of md raid1 pv's), 
on the following;

So far I have been running a smallish (ca. 150Gb) mail/samba server very 
happily on plain xfs on md raid1. I have been doing nightly backups just 
xfsdumping to a seperate disk (which holds only the backups, no raid 
mirrors), and this has been very reliable and convenient. I am doing 
these xfsdumps for the / partition as well as the seperate /home 
partition (which holds all user data, including their maildirs).

I have recently been reading up on backup strategies and found a few 
references to people using lvm, who do an xfs_freeze, take a lvm 
snapshot, xfs_freeze -u, then mount the snapshot ro, then do an xfsdump 
of the ro-mounted snapshot, finally unmount and discard the snapshot.

I do realize the benefits of doing this (i.e. no changed data between 
taking the xfsdump's inventory and the actual dumping of the potentially 
now-changed data), and I am seriously considering converting my whole 
setup to xfs->lvm2->md raid1.

So my question is: are there any issues with this setup that I should be 
 aware of? Would it be okay to have the / as well as the /home 
partitions managed by lvm or is the general consensus to leave / alone 
on a plain-jane xfs-> md raid1? In particular, are there any issues that 
might hit me in the forehead when xfs_freeze-ing / (if only for the few 
seconds it takes to do the lvm snapshot)?

Many thanks for any input,


Kai.

PS: I am running a 2.6.6 kernel, and fairly up-to-date (though non-CVS) 
xfs code; xfsdump 2.2.16, xfsprogs 2.6.3, no lvm yet but planning to use 
lvm2.