Category: Storage

How to replace a Volume in mdadm software RAID array

replace a Volume in mdadm software RAID array
mdadm, which is a Linux Software RAID, is not inferior to a typical hardware RAID controller, and just like a hardware controller – enables us to swap physical disks inside the RAID array. It requires executing some commands indeed, but the whole process still seems to be pretty straightforward.

Usually, we replace a disk in RAID when it starts failing, but there might be scenarios, where you just want to swap mechanical SATA disks in RAID with SSDs, one by one, for better performance, without reinstalling the whole OS.
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Debian Installation with LVM RAID 1 and Hot Spare

Debian 11 installation
Debian is a powerful, multipurpose, and super stable Linux distro, however, in my humble opinion, its installation wizard was never a strong point of this Linux distribution, making it pretty difficult to install for beginners. While the standard setup with just a single disk is still relatively digestible for most users, the more sophisticated setup involving RAID with LVM might be pretty hard and arduous. The purpose of this tutorial is to help you go through the whole installation procedure smoothly and painlessly.

In this tutorial, I present Debian 11 (Bullseye) installation based on MD-RAID, configured in Mirroring mode, with an additional Hot Spare drive and LVM partitioning on top of it.
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Resize Cinder based Volume attached to an Instance in OpenStack

OpenStack Instance volume resize
One of the key features in OpenStack is the ability to resize the Instance’s flavor to increase resource limits used by Instances, such as vCPUs and RAM. Unfortunately, in the case of an Instance with a Cinder-backed volume, changing flavor does not affect the underlying volume.
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How to add Hot Spare Volume to the existing mdadm software RAID array

CentOS 7 installation with LVM RAID 1 mirroring
Having a Hot Spare significantly increases the security of our data in a RAID array. In the case of a single disk failure, a Hot Spare jumps in the place of a faulty drive. Working as a temporary replacement, a Hot Spare can potentially buy time for us before we swap the faulty drive with the new one.

In the below scenario we have an example CentOS 7, installed on top of RAID 1 (mirror) using mdadm software RAID. The array was created by the Anaconda installer script during OS installation, for more details refer to:
CentOS 7 Installation with LVM RAID 1 – Mirroring.
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Install Nextcloud with Docker on Debian 10 Buster

nextcloud docker installation on debian buster
Nextcloud is a lightweight, open-source StaaS (Storage as a Service) platform, written i PHP and JavaScript, which provides file sync, file sharing and creative collaboration services. The software can be installed on local hardware as a perfect alternative for commercial StaaS solutions like Dropbox, OneDrive, Hightail, etc…
Nextcloud is a typical LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) software, but instead of ardous and problematic LAMP environment installation and file sharing platform implementation, we can deploy a turnkey Nextcloud platform in just a few minutes, using Docker containers, preferably with docker-compose.

In this article I am launching Nextcloud platform in two Docker containers: nextcloud and mariadb which use local Docker volumes as a file and database storage. This solution will enable us to quickly and painlessly upgrade our Nextcloud to a newer versions in future.
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CentOS 7 Installation with LVM RAID 1 – Mirroring

CentOS 7 installation with LVM RAID 1 mirroring
CentOS 7 may offer us a possibility of automatic RAID configuration in Anaconda installer, that is during OS installation, once it detects more than one physical device attached to the computer. Mentioned RAID is generally the LVM-RAID setup, based on well known mdadm – Linux Software RAID. It’s a pretty convenient solution, since we don’t need to setup RAID manually after installation, on already running system.

The below procedure presents CentOS 7 testing installation with LVM RAID 1 (Mirroring) on KVM based Virtual Machine with two attached 20GB virtual disks.
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RAID 1 configuration on HP Proliant Gen 9 server using HP SSA

Mount WebDAV remote storage in Fedora Linux using davfs2 driver
HPE Smart Storage Administrator is a tool that allows to quickly configure and manage storage controllers on HPE Proliant servers. HPE SSA offers a simple, intuitive and easy to use GUI interface to quickly create, modify and erase storage arrays based on physical drives installed in the server. HPE SSA replaces the HPE Array Configuration Utility (ACU), and has an updated design for HPE ProLiant servers that enhances the storage experience.

In this short tutorial we will create one of the simplest storage arrays, which is RAID 1 based on two physical drives. RAID 1 (mirroring) provides a replication on all physical drives by writing data to all of them at the same time, it gives us fault-tolerance of N-1 drives where N is a number of used physical drives.
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Mount WebDAV remote storage in Fedora Linux using davfs2 driver

Mount WebDAV remote storage in Fedora Linux using davfs2 driver
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows clients to perform remote Web content authoring operations. The WebDAV protocol provides a framework for users to create, change, copy, move, lock and version the files on a server, typically a web server or web share. This type of protocol is used by some hosting providers (like my favorite HostUpon) in cPanel software, to provide quick and easy access to the files stored in hosting account disk space.

In this tutorial we are mounting remote WebDAV resource in Fedora release 24 via davfs2 file system driver.
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Install and Configure OpenStack Mitaka with GlusterFS on CentOS 7

integrate openstack with glusterfs storage
OpenStack can use diffirent backend technologies for Cinder Volumes Service to create volumes for Instances running in cloud. The default and most common backend used for Cinder Service is LVM (Logical Volume Manager), but it has one basic disadventage – it’s slow and overloads the server which serves LVM (usually Controller), especially during volume operations like volume deletion. OpenStack supports other Cinder backend technologies, like GlusterFS which is more sophisticated and reliable solution, provides redundancy and does not occupy Controller’s resources, because it usually runs on separate dedicated servers.

In this tutorial we are going to deploy VLAN based OpenStack Mitaka on three CentOS 7 nodes (Controller, Network, Compute) using Packstack installer script and integrate it with already existing GlusterFS redundant storage based on two Gluster Peers.

openstack installation and integration with glusterfs
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Extend LVM Volume Group with the new Hard Disk

Extend LVM Volume Group
One of the benefits of LVM (Logical Volume Manager) is the possibility to extend LVM based storage by adding new Physical Volumes which together form LVM Volume Group. Adding new Physical Volume increases the capacity of the whole Volume Group by the capacity of that particular Physical Volume and can be performed online without any outages in LVM activity.
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