DL380 and LVM

[Chris Swenson]

Hi all, I have a new DL380 G4 with the 6i scsi controller and RH ES3 rev 4. It has three 36.4 gig disks set as raid 5. I want to use LVM to accomodate for future growth but I don't quite get understad the LVM and its relationship to R5 to make a good decision on the partitioning. The bulk of my array will be given to /usr/local to run certain applications.

Thanks
CS

[kcpant]

Hi Chris,

AFAIK, LVM can be used if you have created different RAID volumes on several physical disks through Linux itself (software RAID), or you are adding some more physical volumes ( in future you want to add some more physical volumes).Right now, because you only have one physical volume visible to linux ( the H/W RAID volume will be visible to linux as a single one, or the number of logical partitions you have partitioned on H/W RAID), you don't need LVM. you can add some more disks for LVM, make the partition type of disks to 0X8e (type LVM), and the make LVM Volume group by commands pvcreate and vgcreate. now you can make logical volumes on this newly created volume group. you can extend the volume group by adding more disks in future by command vgcreate. For more info on LVM, there are sevaral good docs available on net.

regards

[Chris Swenson]

Ok, so I set up my 3 disks as r5, I split up my array into /boot outside the volume. /,/var/usr/local,/home to my prefered sizes.

Now I stick another disk in the machine and use the HP array tool to extend the r5 array.
What is the next step to add that space to my /home lv.

BTW is is a great site, I have learned a lot from it over the years.
CS