My thoughts on life, the universe and beer

Howdy,

Yesterday at work i had to extend a disk on a Lotus Domino server that i was not able to stop. Since the LUN was on a LVM group i knew i could extend the VG without disrupting the Domino server but i did not just want to add a new LUN to the VG since that tends to get messy after a while.

So i decided to try out pvmove. I had heard some horror stories that it would take ages etc, but since Red Hat supports the tool i decided to try it.

Amazingly i was able to add a new LUN to the VG (one without a partition for a easy resize experience later). The original PV was around 128GB, and it took about 25-35 minutes to move all the data of the PV!

While HP-UX administrators tend to tell you to just use mirroring instead of pvmove, and then just break the mirror and remove the smaller LUN, i found out that what pvmove really does is to create a mirror, and then copy the extends and in the end, remove the mirror. Just make sure you either background the pvmove task or run it in a screen session, preferably with -i 5!

I’m off to watch some telly….

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Man …

I was asked to work today on a holiday. Why? I have to extend a filesystem on a HP-UX 11.31 machine.

Amazingly HP does not include online resizing in the base install of HP-UX. Common people! You have to buy IA64 machines from HP, you have to buy the foundation operating system (minimalistic feature version of HP-UX), but you can not extend filesystems on the fly.

This is one of the reason i think Linux is going to rule the future. RHEL includes this. Hell, OpenSolaris gives you the features needed to extend ZFS free. Even IBM includes these features in AIX!

My point is, that in my free (or paid for subscription of RHEL) install of Linux (even on a IA64 machine) i can mirror disks with LVM, i can resize filesystems, i can even migrate data between disk arrays on-the-fly.

HP really needs to start taking care of they’re customers and stop charging for such a simple feature. Enterprise customers will probably start looking into other operating systems now when the budgets are getting tighter.

Hell, why am i even crying about this, i get my overtime, Linux ends up gaining more respect with enterprise customers and everybody wins!

Well, i have to get going, work calls….

*UPDATE*: While doing some partition resizing on my Macbook i realized that i can resize hfs+ on-the-fly (both shrink and extend). I do realize hfs+ is not the most advanced filesystem out there but common, this is a operating system mainly focused on home usage! HP-UX is a enterprise grade UNIX operating system. C’mon HP!

Bgrds,
Finnzi