I haven't had any experience moving pv's around, but it seems to me that it
would be much safer and probably just as fast to create a new vg with the
new disk and then just copy the data and change a few lines in the fstab.

And as always, have a backup handy if at all possible. No matter how careful
we are those darn computers get the best of our data in the end.

- Jared

On Sep 8, 2010 6:35 PM, "Daniel Fussell" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 09/08/2010 05:49 PM, Von Fugal wrote:
>> So I don't know where to start looking for the answer to this, maybe I'm
>> thinking about it all wrong. I've googled LVM copy, pvmove etc. to no
>> avail.
>>
>> What I want to do is add a new disk to a vg and retire an old disk. I've
>> been burned before badly though with just using pvmove, where minutes
>> after the move is completed the 'new' (not really so new) drive goes bad
>> and the old drive is already 'gone' from the lv. This is not really so
>> out there what with the extensive IO done on the 'new' drive. If it was
>> at all thinking of going bad... it probably will. What I would like to
>> do is copy the contents of the old pv to the new pv, but while still
>> persisting the data in a sort of mirror on the old pv for a time. When
>> things check out, then I want to just vgreduce oldpv and be done with
>> it. I realize I could use lvconvert to turn the concerned lv into a
>> mirrored lv, but when it comes time to remove the old pv, it becomes
>> very klunky to remove the target pv from the mirror, keeping the new
>> one, specifying devices ad nauseum. As well, it makes things even more
>> klunky if you have more than one lv on the old pv you're trying to get
>> rid of 'safely'. It seems like this would be something that lvm could
>> handle exceptionally, but I'm at a loss. Any suggestions?
>>
>> Von Fugal
>>
>>
>>
>>
> I haven't done a pvmove on commodity hardware, but the last time I did a
> pvmove, the vg got confused about where the extents were and stopped
> somewhere in the middle. As the extents are all still there on the
> original disk, I did an lvmcfgrestore to the previous config (lvm2 keeps
> a few config backups around just in case), ran an xfscheck, and
> restarted the pvmove. Worked great.
>
> To put it in perspective, I only had 2 or 3 of these mid-move failures.
> I was moving around 50 or 60 physical volumes at the time.
>
> It sticks in my mind that there was an option for pvmove to mirror the
> entire pv before removing the old drives extent maps, but I might be
> thinking about mirroring on lvm releases with a less reliable pvmove. I
> read somewhere about one person's pvmove nightmares, after which they
> would only mirror the PVs instead of pvmoving things around. I've not
> had that problem. I do have backups of my (rather large) volumes, so
> venturing in the the land of lvmcfgrestore was much more relaxing (and
> successful).
>
> Where the pvmoves are highly sequential, I wouldn't expect the drive to
> fail from excessive head thrashing. Maybe run badblocks on the (empty)
> drive before a pvmove?
>
> Grazie,
> ;-Daniel Fussell
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