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Old 3rd December 2009
DNAeon DNAeon is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Bulgaria
Posts: 138
Default FreeBSD 8.0 and RAID-1

Hello,

A couple of days ago I've sent an email to the lists@, about my issues, but couldn't get a decent solution about my problem. So, here I am asking for some ideas

This is the situation - I want to create a RAID-1 for my FreeBSD 8.0 system.
For that you may say there are already existing tools like:
  • gmirror
  • gvinum
  • gconcat
  • et cetera, and all the other geom tools

From my testings for about 2-3 days now with the new 8.0 RELEASE, I can say that none of the above can do what I need, and that is - Creating a mirror for all the partitions - /var, /tmp, / , swap, /usr and also keeping the possibility to extend these partitions if needed.

Well, that functionality is already present in gvinum, but unfortunately 8.0, doesn't allow you to manipulate the disks, like it was in 7.2 for example.

What I mean is this - in 7.2 you can make a fresh minimal install and then transform all of your partitions to gvinum volumes - now using gpart that is not possible, because you cannot create one big vinum partition that overlaps the others.

Yes, sure I can use gmirror to mirror the partitions, but I cannot extend them if I need one day - using gvinum it's fairly simple - you just add new subdisks to the existing plexes, but the issue remains - you cannot transform the partitions to gvinum volumes in 8.0

Are you guys using a software RAID for your systems? How did you do it? I'm open to any ideas.

Thanks and regards,
DNAeon
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