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-   -   Copying RAID configuration to another system with no RAID?? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/copying-raid-configuration-to-another-system-with-no-raid-718136/)

ojha_riddhish 04-10-2009 02:21 AM

Copying RAID configuration to another system with no RAID??
 
Dear friends,
I have just completed studying RAID and I like the concept very much. But I have an unsatisfied question about RAID? Please guide me further in the conquest of gaining enormous knowledge.
The Scenario : I have created a Software RAID1 setup of two hard disks sdb1 and sdc2 on my RHEL 5 box both of same size 5GB. I know that this information is stored in /proc/mdstat and /etc/mdadm.conf files in my OS(correct me if I'm wrong). Now, I want to ask whether I can generate this same RAID on another computer with same system config and RHEL 5 by copying the files containing RAID info. Or can I get information about this RAID setup and generate a bash script and execute it on the freshly installed system.
If this can happen, it is a great feature for enterprise level RAID setups where they can easily configure RAID without even requiring knowledge of RAID.

Thanks in advance!

acid_kewpie 04-10-2009 02:37 AM

well the rhel5 installer can build raid as part of the installation, so there's no need to script any of this. You can define it in a kickstart file too so if building systems with a template it can be completely automated.

I'm not 100% sure you couldn't migrate the files across, but I think the files (of which I have none available right now) will contain drive serial numbers and such, so not transferable. creating raid "manually" is really very simple though. Probably harder to "migrate" even if it was possible"

ojha_riddhish 04-10-2009 02:44 AM

Thanks acid_kewpie for your information. I am sorry to ask but if I had not installed RAID on RHEL 5 and on another linux flavor, would it be still possible to use the kickstart file? And suppose if my OS on this system got corrupted some how and I had to install a fresh OS, what would happen to my RAID hard disks that contain my all important data. Can I recover? Please guide me if anyone knows about this?

Thanks in advance!!

acid_kewpie 04-10-2009 02:51 AM

Well I *think* the kickstart file for any installed box will be in /boot for your inspection and you can modify that file to add raid manually or use the system-config-kickstart tool. Kickstart is redhat /fedora / centos specific though. No use under debian. If your OS does need reinstalling then during the installation process you can simply pick up the raid drives as you left them, no problem. Indeed with regards to raid configurations, there's no need for any actual files at all, it's all automatically detected, so the installer will just pick it up with no hassle at all.

To confuse you further, also note you can use LVM to provide mirroring instead of RAID, which means you can extend what would function as a RAID1 array to add additional drives to a single volume. Might want to keep it in mind for the future...

ojha_riddhish 04-10-2009 04:58 AM

Thanks once again acid_kewpie. Thanks for the precious info. I might get back to you after experimenting. Thanks!


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