Hi
On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 10:09:43PM +0100, lee wrote:
> Hi,
>
> what's the best way to move existing logical volumes or a whole volume
> group to new disks?
>
> The target disks cannot be installed at the same time as the source
> disks. I will have to make some sort of copy over the network to
> another machine, remove the old disks, install the new disks and put the
> copy in place.
Having to do this over the network makes it slightly
complicated.... But not impossible.
> Using dd doesn't seem to be a good option because extend sizes in the
> old VG can be different from the extend sizes used in the new VG.
>
> The LVs contain VMs. The VMs can be shut down during the migration.
> It's not possible to make snapshots because the VG is full.
Ok.
> New disks will be 6x1TB RAID-5, old ones are 2x74GB RAID-1 on a
> ServeRaid 8k. No more than 6 discs can be installed at the same time.
Assuming that:
* both machines can be online at the same time
* there is a good network connection between them. The fatter the pipe
the better
* both run Debian. Obviously
* The VMs are happy to (eventually) migrate to the new hardware box
Then there is a sneaky way, which can help minimize the downtime: LVM
and network block devices (or iSCSI. Either can work). Chunky,
slightly hacky, but worth considering.
The basic idea is:
* On the receiving machine, prepare the disks. Export the *whole*
disks (or rather: the RAID device(s)) using nbd, xnbd or iSCSI.
* On the sending machine: attach the disks over the network, using nbd
client, xndb client or iSCSI.
* On the sending machine: 'pvcreate' the disks, and 'vgextend' them
into your volume group. So you end up with a volume group that spans
*both* machines. Some of the PVs will be accessed over the network,
but LVM doesn't care. Obviously, the I/O characteristics of the
"remote" disks will be a lot worse.
* Avoid running any LVM commands on the receiving machine just yet -
if you did, it would see a partial volume group and probably
complain like mad. It may even update the metadata on the PVs it
*can* see to say that the "other" PVs are unavailable, which is
tricky to fix.
* On the sending machine, use 'pvmove' to move each LV to the new
disks of your choice. This will send them over the network. This
doesn't *require* any downtime on the VMs, but be prepared for slow
I/O on them, as they will now (increasingly) be accessing stuff over
the network.
* Once all your LVs have been moved, shut down the VMs on the sending
machine and quiesce everything. You want to 'deactivate' the LVs with:
lvchange -an vgname/lvname
This will (amongst other things) remove the entries in /dev for the
LVs, and make them unavailable.
* On the sending machine, use 'vgsplit' to split the volume group into
two volume groups. The remote disks should be moved into a new
volume group.
* On the sending machine: "sync;sync;sync". Just for paranoia's
sake. Paranoia is good, and not a vice.
* On the receiving machine, run 'pvscan', 'vgscan' and similar: This
should now see a complete VG.
* shut down the nbd client/xnbd client/iscsi client on the sending
machine. You don't want the two machines accessing the same
disks. Therein lies madness.
* Activate the LVs on the receiving machine ("lvchange -ay"), copy the
VM definitions across (exactly how depends on your virtualisation)
* Start up the VMs. Pray that they have network etc as before.
* Profit.
I'm sure that there are (hopefully minor) details here that I've
forgotten (backups?), but it should give you the general idea.
Bottom line: Accessing disks over the network is perfectly possible,
if you are willing to live with the added latency. Not a good idea for
database servers or other IO intensive VMs.
It may be a better alternative than extended downtime. As an
administrator, you get to make that trade-off.
Hope this helps
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
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