LVM question

[Steven E. Protter]

I have not installed lvm on my two red hat servers.

I am very familiar with lvm because I'm a certified HP-UX geek.

If I install lvm for Red Hat 7.3 does it pretty much work like the HP-UX version? Can I use it to modify create, existing disk partitions?

Steve

[John Meissner]

Steve - It pretty much works the same. And although you can istall this with Red Hat I don't know if you REALLY want to. I talked to a Red Hat sales rep and a Red Hat engineer (I'll provide their names if you want) and they told me that LVM was known to ocassionally cause data corruption in Linux. This is something they are working on but havn't fixed yet. This is why LVM doesn't ship on Red Hat's professional version. Also a key note is that SuSE knows this same thing but ships LVM with their Professional version. Interesting.....

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hi Steve,

I have been using LVM with RedHat 7.3 for several months and I never experienced data corruption.

Before that, I had been using LVM for 2 years on several SuSE versions and never corrupted data.

LVM for Linux is very similar to Hp-ux. The commands are the same and most of command-line options are similar.
Only one interesting thing : with Linux, the PV is a partition of a disk, not the whole disk. The LVM partition type is 0x8e.

Good luck.

Kodjo

[Kelli Ward]

Hi,
I also use LVM for SuSE and have not had any issues. (Haven't tried it for RedHat yet.)

If you're worried, which sounds valid, maybe you can try abusing the install and commands on a test system before implementing?

Good Luck,
Kel

[John Meissner]

I'm not saying that I've had problems - or - that they're common. I'm just relaying the message I received from Red Hat.

[Eric Bursley]

You may want to try LVM with Red Hat 8.0. Includes new LVM code and is now part of the base install if you perform a GUI installation. I have noticed that LVM for Linux is very similar to HP-UX, however in my honest opinion, it is not ready for Enterprise deployment as LVM is for HP-UX. i.e. No pvlinks support, etc.

[Steven E. Protter]

Eric,

Thanks for the post.

8.0 products don't go even on my backup server.

My two Linux boxes are running a webhosting business and I won't take the risk until the OS release is more mature. This provides my family with real income and I must be cautious.

I will use lvm for display only purposes for now and see what happens when RH 8.X is a little older.

Steve

[Jon_87]

Total BS, the reason RH does not ship LVM is that it was a GERMAN project and they failer to hire Heinz when they we on a war path to hire Germans to get a presence there. They did manage to grab some S/390 dev folks, and you should not that is thier team.

Short of it is they still ship the ridiculous SW RAID tools and tell folks to use it. Insanity for enterprise, good for 2 or 3 IDE drives to dump you MP3's but not LVM at all. Sistina has done a great job with LVM and the new LVM2. It does not have "issues" and I would be currious to learn abou the "and SuSE knows it" Who told you that from SuSE?

Ask Redhat for documented cases.