Has anyone tried IBM's EVMS (Enterprise Volume Storage Manager) recently?
EVMS replaces both MD and LVM and gives you a single interface to both.
It provides both compatibility and superset modes (where EVMS-native
volumes can do fancy things that MD and LVM cannot).
I actually got it working today and managed to put my root on it using
a modified version of their stock initrd.
EVMS has a GUI, an ncurses, and a CLI interface. It will automatically
resize an underlying filesystem when the volume containing it changes size
(assuming the file system will let you do that sort of thing).
I've been playing with a linear array of RAIDed volumes: I pick two
equal-size partitions and put them in a RAID1 (mirror) container. I then
put that container in an MD-style "Linear" container, make it a volume,
and create a file system on it (ext3). When I run out of space, I pick
two more equal-size partitions and put them into another RAID1 container
and then append that container to the end of the Linear container (at
which point the file system is extended to fill the new space). Repeat.
I can tolerate any disk failure that leaves me at least one partition
in each of the RAID1 pairs. Since I'm doing this in "compatibility"
mode, if I disable EVMS and reboot, the standard MD tools understand
the on-disk RAID format.
There's a huge User Manual available that's quite readable.
Start here and follow the EVMS links:
http://linas.org/linux/raid.html
--
-IAN! Ian! D. Allen Ottawa, Ontario, Canada - www.ottawa.ca
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