[Cialug] Transplant OS

[Don Cady]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Daniel A.
Ramaley<daniel.ramaley at drake.edu> wrote:
> and grub or lilo would also have to be run on the new disk. But for the
> LVM partitions, would it be possible to extend the physical volume over
> to the new disk, then tell LVM to move the data over? For a home
Yes, you can add a new drive to your physical group, extend your
logical group into it, move your logical volume over, then reduce the
first two, making the whole move like a ball bearing in a rubber band.
But doing this assumes your volume is already in LVM and you have
hot-swap available.

> machine attempting this might be overkill, but for a critical server
> that shouldn't have any downtime, it might be worth doing. Well, if the
> server is truly "critical" then it probably has RAID and the failure of
> one drive would simply require replacing that drive... so perhaps this
> idea isn't practical after all.
Exactly. Maybe I'm shortsighted, but determining if it's practical is
half of the crux of LVM. It provides no redundancy (in fact, it gets
-1 in that department), so you've got to put it on top of raid or
something else. Now to add logical volumes, you're adding raid sets,
adding more complexity for a little flexibility. There are better
options than managing volumes-inside-LVM-on-top-of-RAID. I don't
understand what all the hubub @ LVM is for, as I can only see small
windows of usefulness. Maybe it's that it's FSF appoved.

Don