Storage Node with Multiple HDD's (no Raid) possible?

[Wayne Workman]

@x23piracy make sure you don’t get a hybrid card. I have some hybrid cards and they only work with CentOS 7. Hybrid cards are dirt cheap - I’d advise avoiding them. You need a card that will conceal the disks from the machine’s hardware and OS, only allowing the volumes you create to show as one-individual-disk. This is the most simple, and you’ll have the least amount of complications. These types of cards are a little more expensive but it’s totally worth it.

[ITSolutions]

@Wayne-Workman You don’t need to have raid to use multiple drives on a single node. But the storage won’t be a seamless 4 tb, you could configure it to have each drive configured as separate groups/nodes on your server. I actually have a similar setup right now. I have my internal SATA drive setup with my normal images for everyday use, for speed. But I have a 3tb USB drive that I have as a second storage group and node on the same machine. I use the USB drive to capture backups of the tech workstations in case of a crash.

[ITSolutions]

[ITSolutions]

@x23piracy said in Storage Node with Multiple HDD's (no Raid) possible?:

Hi,

in normal i would take Raid but this Computer can only do Software Raid an Ubuntu 14.04.4 doesnt like it, Raid10 unpossible get a lot of error trying to install and Raid 1 with only 2 of the 4 disks has problem installing grub because the softraid is using a virtual device mapper thing.

3 Years Ago with Ubuntu 12 i could manage that problem after reading a lot of stuff.

I need a real raid or sas controller for this i think.

Regards X23

Or the other choice could be, if you have a fifth drive and ability to hook it up to your MB, is install Ubuntu to the fifth drive (even if it is small 40+gb) and then raid the 4x1tb as the /images partition in the system. This would allow you to do the raid, and separate the OS from the storage. I recommend this setup when possible. If you ever need to blow away the OS you won’t lose your images.

[Wayne Workman]

@ITSolutions this is true, but is the storage combined?

Also - very nice solution for image backups! This should be the recommended method.

[Wayne Workman]

@ITSolutions said in Storage Node with Multiple HDD's (no Raid) possible?:

Or the other choice could be, if you have a fifth drive and ability to hook it up to your MB, is install Ubuntu to the fifth drive (even if it is small 40+gb) and then raid the 4x1tb as the /images partition in the system. This would allow you to do the raid, and separate the OS from the storage. I recommend this setup when possible. If you ever need to blow away the OS you won’t lose your images.

I’d also recommend sticking the OS on RAID 1, in addition to the RAID 10 for images.

[Sebastian Roth]

@x23piracy I guess this is one of those cases for which LVM (logical volume manager) was made for. It’s very flexible when it comes to adding/moving/removing physical disks to a combined logical volume at runtime. Just pop in a new disk, add it to your big logical volume and expand your filesystem (resize2fs) - all on the fly. There are a lot of articles on the web on how to do this. Here is just one example…

[Tom Elliott]

@Sebastian-Roth Do you think it’d be worth testing the disk and building the LVM dynamically in the init’s? I don’t know what that would entail, but if we could get it to work, shrinking should work too. Maybe a flag (if we can do this at all) to tell fog to build the LVM similar to how it can build RAID. Then work off the LVM Disk, rather than physical disks. Shrink/Expand should work (theoretically) with that approach, but only for LVM itself.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Tom-Elliott From what I understand this question was about using several disks for storing the images on the FOG server. Nothing to do with LVM on the client… But maybe I got it wrong.

[x23piracy]

@Sebastian-Roth hehe what i am now trying to do is reinstalling the 4x1 tb storage node with lvm, its one of the possible solutions i was looking for

[ITSolutions]

@Wayne-Workman said in Storage Node with Multiple HDD's (no Raid) possible?:

I’d also recommend sticking the OS on RAID 1, in addition to the RAID 10 for images.

I would recommend that but the OP mentioned he was having issues with RAID setting up RAID to boot from. So I was addressing the possible solutions to avoid RAID. Otherwise getting a hardware RAID card would solve the issue all together.

@ITSolutions this is true, but is the storage combined?

No the storage shows as 2 different nodes, when you create an image definition you tell it what group, either backup or default.