[olug] LVM, journaling fs, and high availability?

Eric Penne epenne at olug.org
Thu Jun 12 22:52:36 UTC 2003


Reading /. made me think about LVM which I know nothing about.

If I were to make a high availability server (ie mail, web, DNS, etc.) and
was following the practice of one server process (apache) per server and I
wanted maximum uptime, would it make sense to use journaling filesystems
and LVM?  Is journaling and LVM made for this type of task?  I'm not
worried about system load, I'll overkill on that to get good life from a
PC.

In my head I'm thinking, email server for 100 users with Pentium 4 and 2
40GB hard drives in raid for redundancy and 4GB of RAM.  I would want a
server that I can set up and never worry about (except security holes).  I
want the P4 because I know it will handle the load for the next 8+ years. 
I choose a lot of hard drive space because I don't want to run out of
space.  I choose raid because it one drive dies I want the other one to
just take over and run until I can get there to fix it.  Hardware that
won't ever be the weak point.

What other things should I be thinking about?

I don't know if this rambling made sense but hopefully somebody can pick
up on my jumbled train of thought.

Eric Penne




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