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Date:      Tue, 30 Mar 1999 09:04:08 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Kiril Mitev <kiril@ideaglobal.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: vinum with MANY parts
Message-ID:  <19990330090408.P413@lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <199903291432.PAA09454@idea.co.uk>; from Kiril Mitev on Mon, Mar 29, 1999 at 03:32:19PM %2B0100
References:  <19990327193206.D53452@lemis.com> <199903291432.PAA09454@idea.co.uk>

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On Monday, 29 March 1999 at 15:32:19 +0100, Kiril Mitev wrote:
>>
>> On Thursday, 25 March 1999 at 17:29:24 +0000, Kiril Mitev wrote:
>>> Hi All
>>>
>>> This is what i am trying to do...
>>> I have 2 disks of 4gb and 2 disks of 8gb, and i am
>>> trying to make them into 1 big volume...
>>>
>>> questions :-)
>>> 1. my understanding is that if more than one plex is in
>>> a volume, these plexes (en) become mirrors, right ?
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>>> 2. so, all 4 disks should be in one plex, right ?
>>
>> Almost.  The *contents* of the drives should be in one plex.  You need
>> to create a subdisk which uses up all the space in a drive, and add
>> that to the plex.
>>
>>> 3. i should be able to 'concat' all 4 disks into a plex, right ?
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>>> 4. is it possible (if yes, how?) to set the equal-sized
>>> 'drives' to be striped ?
>>
>> Well, not really, since you can only stripe plexes.  And yes, each
>> subdisk of a striped plex must be the same size.  I'll leave it as an
>> exercise for the reader to figure out how to make the subdisks the
>> same size :-)
>>
>> Here's one possibility for the "one big volume" scenario:
>>
>> drive 1 device /dev/da1e
>> drive 2 device /dev/da2e
>> drive 3 device /dev/da3e
>> drive 4 device /dev/da4e
>> volume everything
>>   plex org concat
>>     sd length 4g drive 1
>>     sd length 4g drive 2
>>     sd length 2g drive 3
>>     sd length 2g drive 4
>>
>> You don't say which version of Vinum you're planning to use, but there
>> has been a lot of work on -stable lately, and it'll be retrofitted to
>> -STABLE Real Soon Now, so unless you're using 2.2.8, you should get
>> the -CURRENT version from ftp://ftp.lemis.com/pub/vinum/ and test
>> that.  It'll run on 3.1 and -STABLE as well.  In a couple of days,
>> then, you can get the retrofitted version.
>
> Thanks, Greg :-) I managed to get it working at the end, by 
> splitting the 'big' disks into 2 halves & using a total of
> 6 subdisks :-)

Hmm.  This doesn't exactly get you the desired effect.  The idea of
striping across disks is to reduce positioning time and disk queues.
Striping on two subdisks on a single disk rather kills that.  In any
case, you said you just wanted one big disk, in which case
concatenation is the way to go.

> My only peeve was that since I had to play from vinum CLI
> quite a lot to get the size etc right, and I HAD to reboot
> quite a few times to lose the old config ... like when I 
> clean (using RM) stuff, and I do a 'l' in vinum CLI,
> it would list something like ======
> Drives:         0 (8 configured)
> Volumes:        0 (4 configured)
> Plexes:         1 (8 configured)
> Subdisks:       0 (16 configured)
> =======
> BUT no plex is actually listed :-) (your?) warnings
> nonwithstanding, i had to do a resetconfig + reboot...

Well, you haven't really described what happened when you did the
recommended thing (like just stopping, for example).  Of course, you
don't say which version you're using, and there were problems stopping
older versions.

> even now, i have 1 'ghost' subdisk somewhere ......care
> to comment, please ?
> 
> uname => FreeBSD ... 3.1-RELEASE
> vinum l =>
> Configuration summary
> 
> Drives:         4 (8 configured)
> Volumes:        1 (4 configured)
> Plexes:         2 (8 configured)
> Subdisks:       7 (16 configured)  <-- where is # 7 ??

Interesting.  It happens here too.  This seems to be a bug.  I'll look
at it today.

Greg
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