Linux LVM and HP Hardware array

[Megan Moore]

Sorry this is a double post, because I am not able to find any answers anywhere.

Is anyone using Linux LVM with MSA60 and P400 storage controller? (or whatever storage controller and disks)?

My department at the university has bought this setup and I was chosen to set this up.


If you are using it, what setup are you using? How did you create your physical volumes, LVs, and ext3 filesystem?

What special tuning are you using for performance, for example to my understanding you can set physical volume extends, lvm stripe size, ext3 stride etc..etc..

How does stride relate to RAID 5 controller, LV, and PV.

Performance is very critical because we are doing fluid mechanics simulations with these servers. I will be doing a lot of reads.

Any ideas?

thanks
Megan

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Megan,

We're using very MSA class hardware for a number of Linux installations, including as shared storage for clusters.

There is no difference between this and local storage except its on a different device path.

You can use PSP on the server to get additional tools for storage management.

Essentially the process is this:
1) Set up the raid disk devices which you can do the the HP Array Configuration utility (part of PSP). or
1-alt) You can use fdisk or parted to do the same thing from the command line.

Then its standard LVM
pvcreate
vgcreate
vgextend
lvcreate

Raid is set up in step 1, and is transparent to LVM.

SEP

[Jon Gomersall]

Megan

Like it has been said before LVM just the same as on local hard drives...

One thing to take into consideration is whether or not you have BBWC (Battery Backed Write Cache). I know you said that you will be mainly reading information from disk but this could help with the controller not having to wait on I/O on writing.

Also you may be better using a Raid 1 array for the Data Area as you will be able to read data at a better rate due to the extra number of Read Heads available

[Megan Moore]

I do have BBWC.

I am confused on how ext3 is laying over lvm's stripe size using stride.

can you help me with that?