Submitted by Have you ever needed a software RAID solution for a low-end server install? Perhaps you’ve wanted your workstation to take advantage of the redundancy provided by a disk mirror without investing in a hardware RAID controller. Has a prior painful configuration experience turned you off software RAID altogether on Unix systems? Read more at OnLamp.
Using Software RAID-1 with FreeBSD
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have gmirror deployed in production. when I was setting up the servers I used it to replicate the install of the first machine to the others by simply swapping a drive over and rebuilding the mirror on each machine, it was very nice.
Edited 2005-11-12 19:27
I was told and have been under the impression that software RAID -regardless of platform- was a Bad Thing. Is this true?
No.
Maybe it will provide less performance gains than a hardware solution. But then again hardware raid adds the controller as a point of failure and possible data loss, depending on the kind of controller.
With gmirror I was able to pull one of the drives from an active system, while compiling world, with only a momentary pause. That was in a two drive system so it was booted from the mirror volume.
Ahh, I see. Thanks for the helpful reply.
As always Dru Lavigne bring to us another COOL article, like many more in the past.
Thanks Dru, one more good article
Maybe a coincidence but I was looking for information on how to set up a Raid-1 configuration with FreeBSD a few days ago…
Anyway, I’d like to know if some one already read BSD Hacks from Dru, it looks interesting from the table of contents and the positive reviews I’ve seen here and there…
Why is he using gmirror/gstrip? I thought mirroring and stripping function are supported by gvinum as well and it is supposed to be more advance….?
Probably because gmirror is dead simple and reliable while gvinum is complex and AFAIK still not up to the stability or command set of the old vinum.
I switched to gmirror back at 5.3 as vinum became deprecated and gvinum simply wasn’t there yet.
gmirror has given me 0 problems in a production environment for the last year. (mirroring system drives on a 3 heavily loaded mail servers.)
Honestly, gmirror works very well so why not use it?
BTW, graid3 seems to also work quite nicely.
another article that covers much of the same ground is also available at freebsdwiki.net: http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/RAID1%2C_Software%2C_H…
disclosure: I contribute and help maintain the freebsdwiki (although I didn’t write that particular article)