[ale] bigger disks under RAID1 with RHL 9 or RHEL4 on DellPowerEdge?

[Jerry Yu]

I knew it could be a long shot :(  It is such a tempting ideal solution to
grow disk storage on 1U rack servers (limited  disk bays) w/o interrupting
services. Otherwise one'd resort to an external disk enclosure and such.

On 9/21/06, Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com> wrote:
>
>  We use Dell with PERC here.
>
>
>
> Note that there are different PERC versions and even OEMs (Adapatec and
> LSI).   Haven't done what you say in Linux.  Asked the Windows guys who have
> been using them far longer and they've never done it either.
>
>
>
> I doubt the growfs/mdadm for software RAID would deal with hardware RAID
> of PERC.
>
>
>
> My guess is it wouldn't work.  You'd likely be limited to your original
> partition sizes on the hardware RAID device (e.g. /dev/sda) which can be
> seen with fdisk ?l /dev/sda.  It would be interesting to try on a test
> system.   Perhaps it would extend the 4th partition automatically (the
> Win95 ext) and allow you to create additional extended partition.   I
> wouldn't try it on an existing production system unless I had a full backup
> and was ready to do a reload and restore.
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] *On Behalf Of *Jerry
> Yu
> *Sent:* Thursday, September 21, 2006 9:43 AM
> *To:* Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> *Subject:* Re: [ale] bigger disks under RAID1 with RHL 9 or RHEL4 on
> DellPowerEdge?
>
>
>
> thanks, Danny. I am aware of the growfs util to grow a software raid under
> Linux. do you mean that it and its  cohorts can handle a hardware raid the
> same way?
>
> On 9/21/06, *Danny Cox* <DCox at icc.net> wrote:
>
> Jerry,
>
> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 15:45 -0400, Jerry Yu wrote:
> > I am under the impression if I replace a 9G disk under RAID 1
> > (hardware raid by PERC) with a bigger disk, say 146G, the mirroring
> > would still work fine. After it all synced up, I can swap the
> > remaining 9G disk with yet another 146G. If all this works out, now
> > I'd have a pair of 146G with its top 9G used in the mirror w/o
> > interrupting service.  However, any way I can use the left-over
> > 146-9=137G ?
>
>         Yes, there's a new on-the-fly RAID resizing/restructuring feature
> in
> the later kernels.  See the Grow mode of mdadm.  You'll also need an FS
> that can dynamically grow also.  XFS can, and I'm pretty sure most of
> the others can too.
>
>         Do make a backup first, of course (words of bitter experience ;-).
>
> --
> Daniel S. Cox
> Internet Commerce Corporation
>
>
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