[olug] Home file server - FreeNAS or Openfiler or ???

[Benjamin Watson]

I have a FreeNAS setup at home and couldn't be more happy with it.
Though I've not run into expanding my existing 2TB raid5 setup just
yet (mine is a HW limitation of the raid controller more than anything
else).

With respect to LVM, I've used it to add space before.  What I would
highly recommend is grabbing a copy of VMWare Player (or your favorite
virtualization software) and installing something that uses LVM by
default (e.g. Fedora) and experimenting.  In my particular case, I had
a Fedora VM for some development and went with a default 8GB virtual
hard disk.  After installing Fedora, updating, and installing some
software, I ran into problems installing Oracle XE (insufficient disk
space).  This is where LVM came in handy.  I explored powering down
the VM and merely allocating more space to the existing virtual HDD,
as well as adding another new virtual HDD.  Googling LVM and playing
around and I was in business.  Again, practice with virtual stuff that
you don't care about, document your steps, and then when you feel
comfortable, try it on real hardware.

Ben

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Christopher Cashell
<topher-olug at zyp.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Kevin <sharpestmarble at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A hundred times over? I know LVM is awesome, but I don't know that I'd go to
>> that extreme. I do appreciate the extra flexibility that it affords us, but
>> I don't think it's the be-all-end-all. If someone tries to give you
>> something like that, them either a fanboi or they're trying to sell it
>> something.
>
> I'm not saying LVM is perfect (it's not), or that it does everything
> (it doesn't).  But, when compared to straight raw partitions,
> especially with recent LVM/kernel releases, I think the features do
> outweigh the (negligible) faults a hundred times over.  There's just
> not much in the way of faults for anyone with a good understanding of
> LVM, and many of the features are incredibly useful.
>
>> That said, given the situation here, is go the LVM route. It will let you
>> dynamically expand or reduce a filesystem.
>
> Expand and reduce filesystems, delayed allocation, take snapshots for
> backups (now with merge support!), have consistent and reliable
> (logical) device naming, pooling multiple disks into a single storage
> pool, disk mirroring, etc.
>
> A lot of people use LVM primarily when adding new physical disks.  And
> it works great there.  But, one of the most useful things I've found
> with LVM, and one of the reasons I use it for essentially every linux
> box, is that you don't need to have a perfect understanding of what
> your future needs will be for a system.
>
> This is particularly useful when you've got got a lot of machines to
> deal with, because you can install a standard base layout that will
> work 95% of the time, but still manipulate it later to meet specific
> needs.  If I have a 100GB disk, I might only allocate 50GB of it to
> the initial system partitions, reserving the other 50GB in the LVM
> Volume Group.  Then, six months down the road, when I discover I need
> more disk space in /var, or find that a third party application I'm
> using needs an additional 20GB in /opt, I can easily pull from that
> reserve space and grow any partition I want.
>
> The system disk(s) never get fully allocated at build time on boxes I work with.
>
> --
> Christopher
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> https://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>