topic Re: BOOT DISK MIRRORING in LINUX in Operating System - Linux

BOOT DISK MIRRORING in LINUX

seenivasan — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:59:43 GMT

Dear,

if possible to mirror the boot disk at rhel?same way for troublshooting LVM like HP-UX?

Regards,

Re: BOOT DISK MIRRORING in LINUX

kemo — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 08:26:07 GMT

check the attachement

Re: BOOT DISK MIRRORING in LINUX

Chhaya_Z — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:22:00 GMT

Hi,

Are you trying to take a backup of your boot disk such that if the original disk goes bad you can boot from the other one?

If so then you can use the dd command:

dd if= of= bs= count=

Re: BOOT DISK MIRRORING in LINUX

Tim Nelson — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:21:45 GMT

most newer servers have an internal raid card for the internal disk ( even on IPF). it negates the need to use OS mirroring as it is done at the HW level.

Re: BOOT DISK MIRRORING in LINUX

dirk dierickx — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 07:49:16 GMT

you can set this up during the installation of RH, if you have already a live system and want to convert the disks to have RAID (software) protection, it is very difficult to setup at that stage and depending on how your disks are used right now maybe even impossible.

linux software raid wiki with all the infor you could possibly need:
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid

Re: BOOT DISK MIRRORING in LINUX

Alzhy — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:30:13 GMT

"Troubleshooting LVM like in HP-UX"?

By that I trust your Linux OS sits on top of an LVM scheme. And you have a neeed to have a fallback OS in case the main LVM OS VG conks out as a precautiion to patching or "accidents" - right? And so you can have an easy fallback - no?

If so - you have a myriad of choices to wit:

1) MondoRescue - easy to set up and could be acceptably "fast"
2) Alternate vgbroot where you set up a fully bootable and independent but easily refreshed (via dd or LVM snapshot) of your primay
3) SAN Boot where you use your SAN Array's snapshot capability to backup and fallback your OS.

I do wish Linux will soon have something similar to DRD (Dynamic Rootdisk -- ala HP-UX 11.31 - drd clone) or Solaris LiveUpate (lucreate, etc.). But I believe it will eventually come.