[olug] LVM, journaling fs, and high availability?

[Sam Tetherow]

Eric Penne wrote:
> Reading /. made me think about LVM which I know nothing about.
> 
> If I were to make a high availability server (ie mail, web, DNS, etc.) and
> was following the practice of one server process (apache) per server and I
> wanted maximum uptime, would it make sense to use journaling filesystems
> and LVM?  Is journaling and LVM made for this type of task?  I'm not
> worried about system load, I'll overkill on that to get good life from a
> PC.
> 
> In my head I'm thinking, email server for 100 users with Pentium 4 and 2
> 40GB hard drives in raid for redundancy and 4GB of RAM.  I would want a
> server that I can set up and never worry about (except security holes).  I
> want the P4 because I know it will handle the load for the next 8+ years. 
> I choose a lot of hard drive space because I don't want to run out of
> space.  I choose raid because it one drive dies I want the other one to
> just take over and run until I can get there to fix it.  Hardware that
> won't ever be the weak point.
> 
> What other things should I be thinking about?
> 
> I don't know if this rambling made sense but hopefully somebody can pick
> up on my jumbled train of thought.
> 
> Eric Penne
> 
> 
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Not that I am against nice new machines, but email for 100 people comes 
no where close to needing 4GB of RAM or a P4 for a processor, the raid 
and drives set up is sufficient for the forseeable future, the 
journaling FS is a good idea for any system in my opinion although I 
think what you want is software raid not LVM, if you are running 2 40GB 
drives and are concerned about availablity running them as a stripe 
mirror is what you want (yes, I know that it is actually just a mirror 
with only 2 drives, but you may want to add additional drives in the 
future and it is just one less thing to change).


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sam Tetherow                           tetherow at nicusa.com
Director of Development
NIC Labs (PSSG)                        http://www.nicusa.com