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Date:      Sat, 14 Jul 2001 09:28:21 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Mark Drayton <mark.drayton@izr.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Vinum mirrored/striped confusion
Message-ID:  <20010714092821.F99931@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <20010714004038.A58799@drex.staff.izr.com>; from mark.drayton@izr.com on Sat, Jul 14, 2001 at 12:40:39AM %2B0100
References:  <20010714004038.A58799@drex.staff.izr.com>

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On Saturday, 14 July 2001 at  0:40:39 +0100, Mark Drayton wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm trying to set up a machine with a striped and mirrored set for use
> with postfix and cyrus. From vinum(8):
>
>   You may want to have the best of both worlds and have both resilience
>   and performance.  This is sometimes called RAID-10 (a combination of
>   RAID-1 and RAID-0), though again this name is misleading.  With vinum
>   you can do this with the following configuration file:
>
>     drive d1 device /dev/da2e
>     drive d2 device /dev/da3e
>     drive d3 device /dev/da4e
>     drive d4 device /dev/da5e
>     volume raid setupstate
>      plex org striped 512k
>        sd length 512m drive d1
>        sd length 512m drive d2
>        sd length 512m drive d3
>        sd length 512m drive d4
>      plex org striped 512k
>        sd length 512m drive d4
>        sd length 512m drive d3
>        sd length 512m drive d2
>        sd length 512m drive d1
>
> I don't quite understand why mirroring two plexes containing the same
> subdisks is beneficial. What happens if, say, disk 1 fails?

If you mean d1, then you'll lose the first 512 MB of plex 0 and the
last 512 MB of plex 1.  These parts of the volume will no longer be
mirrored.

> I imagine both plexes will be faulty and the volume will be down

This is incorrect.  The volume will remain up.

> which (to me) almost defies the point of mirroring.
>
>     drive d1 device /dev/da2e
>     drive d2 device /dev/da3e
>     drive d3 device /dev/da4e
>     drive d4 device /dev/da5e
>     volume raid setupstate
>      plex org striped 512k
>        sd length 512m drive d1
>        sd length 512m drive d2
>      plex org striped 512k
>        sd length 512m drive d3
>        sd length 512m drive d4
>
> If disk 1 failed with this setup, will the volume still be up with one
> of its plexes in the faulty state?

Yes, the volume will still be up.

> Aside from this possible difference, is one of these two setups
> going to perform better (for a mail server) than the other?

Well, the second config only has half the storage :-)  But if you made
those 1 GB subdisks, the performance should be comparable.

Note that 512 kB stripes are suboptimal.  I've fixed the man page in
many places, but I see I've left some behind.  Choose a stripe size in
that order of magnitude which is not a power of 2.

Greg
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