[asterisk-users] Saftware RAID1 or Hardware RAID1 with Asterisk

[Dave Fullerton]

Zane C.B. wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:33:23 +0530
> "Vidura Senadeera" <vidurased at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I would like to get community's feedback with regard to RAID1
>> ( Software or Hardware) implementations with asterisk.
>>
>> This is my setup
>>
>> Motherboard with SATA RAID1 support
>> CENT OS 4.4
>> Asterisk 1.2.19
>> Libpri/zaptel latest release
>> 2.8 Ghz Intel processor
>> 2 80 GB SATA Hard disks
>> 256 MB RAM
>> digium PRI/E1 card
>>
>> Following are the concerns I am having
>>
>> I'm planing to put this asterisk server in production enviorment
>> which is having E1 connection to the asterisk server, approximately
>> 20 con-current calls, Music on hold, voice mail boxes.
>>
>> 1. If I use Software RAID, what would be the impact to my
>> deployment? ( problems that I have to face with regard to the call
>> flow ) 2. If I use Hardware based RAID 1, what would be the impact
>> to the system? 3. According to your practical experiance what is
>> the ideal solution among both options?
>>
>> I will be highly appreciate your feedback on this regard.
> 
> 1: Software RAID on Linux is way less than impressive. Plus last a I
> checked Linux can't handle mirroring a entire disk. Last I looked at
> it around a year ago you were limited to only mirroring partitions,
> which is a joke from a administrative standpoint.
> 2: No real impact other than a bad disk won't mean a reinstall.
> 3: On Linux, go hardware. On FreeBSD it is personal choice.

You can (sort of) run raid on an entire disk, but you have to use LVM. 
You basically create a single partition on the disk, run raid on that 
partition and then use LVM with the /dev/md? device as a physical volume 
that you can then "partition" with LVM.

-Dave