Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 20:49:05 -0400 From: James Quick <jq@quick.com> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Questions about stability of snapshots and vinum in 5.1 Message-ID: <F0C5F3D6-CD27-11D7-8CF2-003065C496DC@quick.com>
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My goal is to have a box, with 2 drives, each of which is identically configured. Slice 1, and Slice 2, will be smallish FreeBSD partitions 4-8 GB each. 1 will be treated as a production environment. The other will be used for building and testing new environments. The bulk of the space will be used for data. Each pair of production and test slices will be periodically mirrored to it's twin to provide a measure of fault tolerance. The box currently has one of the two new large drives installed, and 3 smaller aging (and ailing) drives. I was hoping to use vinum for all the rest, as it would give me far more flexibility. Based on recent posts it sounds like I should wait on that, and will leave enough unconfigured space at the top so that I can migrate from manually created partitions to vinum once I feel that geom+vinum have stabilized a bit. I am seeking feedback on the status of vinum, and whether the following plan makes sense as an upgrade plan for a host with a light load but whose downtime windows are short. I am curious if my planned use of snapshots is risky in 5.1, I have used them in under a much older 5.0 version with no problems, but a lot has changed. I have not migrated my data onto the first of these drive since I need to configure one, migrate from 2 old drives, then put in the second new drive before continuing. I also need to do as much of this work as possible without interruption. My plan is, to build out the first set of partitions, then create a queue of jobs for each disk controller: 1. create a snapshot on the destination drive. 2. use dump+restore or tar at a decent nice value, to copy from source to the new dest. 3. Then when I can shutdown production, and all the old data has completed a full (though aged) copy, get rid of the old mirrors. Use rsync to copy the changes to the destination. 4. Create snapshots on the new system volumes, boot into the new environment for testing. 5. If that goes well, swap out one of the old drives for the second new one, build out the OS copies, and copies of critical user data. 6. I can then get rid of, or fool around with the old disks at my leisure.
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