Linux on-line Software RAID reshaping

Thu, 05/04/2007 - 5:43pm — tumbleweed

I first read about on-line Software RAID reshaping a year ago on LWN. Today I tried it on a live system (that's too big to be backed-up first :-))

I added 2 250GB drives to my existing RAID5 array of 4, making for a 1.2TiB array. The reshape took a while...:

md0 : active raid5 sdb1[4] sda1[5] sdf1[2] sde1[3] sdd1[1] sdc1[0]

      732587712 blocks super 0.91 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]

      [>....................]  reshape =  1.9% (4800784/244195904) finish=397.4min speed=10034K/sec

But when it was done:

$ df -h

/dev/md0              1.2T  657G  509G  57% /mnt/storage

This is one of the reasons why I love software RAID, while you have a kak load more I/O through the PCI(E) bus than you would with hardware RAID, you get the flexibility of the highest-end hardware controllers on a normal PC motherboard.

And of course, should things go pear-shaped, I don't need to find an identical controller, I just have to find a box with 6 SATA sockets.

HOWTO reshape

Lets say you have 4 SATA drives, /dev/sda to /dev/sdd, and you are adding a new one /dev/sde.

Check that everything is happy:

$ cat /proc/mdstat

md0 : active raid5 sdd1[3] sdc1[1] sdb1[2] sda1[0]

      937705728 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]

Partition the new drive (clone sdas partition table onto sde):

# sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sde

Add the new drive:

# mdadm -a /dev/md0 /dev/sde1

Grow the RAID:

# mdadm --grow -n5 /dev/md0

Watch the progress:

$ watch cat /proc/mdstat

Grow the filesystem:

# resize_reiserfs /dev/md0

See the extra space:

$ df -h

linux
raid

Comments

Mon, 23/04/2007 - 8:23pm — Sean Puttergill (not verified)

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