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Date:      Sun, 26 Aug 2001 10:08:35 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        scanner@jurai.net
Cc:        Odhiambo Washington <wash@wananchi.com>, Mario Doria <mariodoria@yahoo.com>, FBSD-Q <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Setup VINUM
Message-ID:  <20010826100835.J21776@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0108241350110.77542-100000@sasami.jurai.net>; from scanner@jurai.net on Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 01:50:47PM -0400
References:  <20010824175750.D84710@ns2.wananchi.com> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0108241350110.77542-100000@sasami.jurai.net>

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On Friday, 24 August 2001 at 13:50:47 -0400, scanner@jurai.net wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
>
>> * Mario Doria <mariodoria@yahoo.com> [20010824 17:37]: writing on the subject 'Setup VINUM'
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm planning on setting up a machine with four disks working on RAID 1 (one
>>> pair of 9GB drives and one pair of 40GB drives). I want to use vinum but first
>>> I want to have a pretty good grasp about it, so, please if you know about a
>>> tutorial, can you please send it to me?
>
> Yes. Use mine at http://www.jurai.net/~scanner/vinum-howto.html

There are a number of misleading statements in this tutorial.  For
example, the entire section on labelling with sysinstall is a waste of
time: it's completely unnecessary.  It also claims that Vinum wants
special indentation, which is just plain not true, though I tend to
indent like that in the examples.

The most important inaccuracy is the claim that the stripe size should
be exactly 256 kB.  That's wrong: use one a little larger, as
described in the man page:

   For optimum performance, stripes should be at least 128 kB in size:
   anything smaller will re- sult in a significant increase in I/O
   activity due to mapping of individual requests over multiple disks.
   The performance improvement due to the increased number of
   concurrent transfers caused by this mapping will not make up for
   the performance drop due to the increase in latency.  A good
   guideline for stripe size is be- tween 256 kB and 512 kB.  Avoid
   powers of 2, however: they tend to cause all superblocks to be
   placed on the first subdisk.

I've been meaning to read this document and send some suggestions back
to you, but I just haven't had time.  It has some good stuff in it,
but it really needs to be read in conjunction with the man pages.
Basically, you can't compress all the info about Vinum into a couple
of hundred lines.  You need to understand the principles, and this
tutorial doesn't help with that.

Greg
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