Raid1 With Lvm From Scratch

In this manual will be created RAID1 with LVM. In this tutorial, disk are mounted in system as /dev/sdX and /dev/sdY

Prerequisites

• 2 empty HDDs with same capacity
• Kernel with LVM
• lvm2
• parted

Software

Install lvm2 package

Install parted

Disk partitions create

Create partitions on both disks with parted

Start parted for /dev/sdX disk

Set units to mib

Create GPT table on disk

Create primary partition, use all available space

Set partition name to raiddata0

Add lvm flag to new partition

Result should be:

Execute same parted commands for /dev/sdY

LVM

Next steps will be to create physical volumes on both disks, add both physical volume to same volume group and create logical volume with raid1 logic

Physical volume

Create physical LVM volumes on first disk on first partition

Create physical LVM volumes on second disk on first partition

Volume group

Include both physical volumes to one volume group with name *raid0vg0*

Now both disks in same volume group.

Logical Volume

Create logical volume with name *raid0lv0* on volume group *raid0vg0* with RAID1 logic, use all available space. --nosync means skip the initial synchronization for raid1 (because this is new raid without any data on it)

Now raid1 created on both disks /dev/sdX and /dev/sdY . Last step left - create FS and mount this FS on boot. see section below

EXT4 Filesystem (non encrypted)

Create filesystem on VolumeGroup *raid0vg0* on logical volume r*aid0lv0*

Done

Mount filesystem on boot

Run blkid to find UUID of ext4 filesystem on our LVM raid1

• UUID="10092fa9-43f5-421e-a0a1-ca96323c6388"* is id of our ext4 filesystem on raid1. Last thing is to add fs uuid to fstab

Create mountpoint /mnt/data

Add to fstab mounting

...
UUID=10092fa9-43f5-421e-a0a1-ca96323c6388  /mnt/data        ext4        defaults        0 2
...

EXT4 Filesystem (encrypted with LUKS)

Create luks AES encrypted partition on top of Volume Group *raid0vg0* in Logical Volume *raid0lv0* (raid1)

Map encrypted luks disk as *raid0lv0encripted*

Create EXT4 filesystem in luks disk

Mount LUKS encrypted device on boot from LVM raid1

First, create directrory, that will contain keys for encrypting/decryption devices

Create 4k keyfile with name main

Add main keyfile to list of keys, that can decrypt disk (technically: add keyfile to LUKS slot)

Find id of LUKS device (should be same as LV raid0lv0)

In our case it is UUID="cd5740a1-b642-4359-a0b9-af84a8f01092"

Add to file /etc/conf.d/dmcrypt

Add dmcrypt to be started at boot

Create mountpoint /mnt/data

Find EXT4 filesystem UUID

In our case it is UUID="fc7ec587-35e4-4726-815d-e1693cd89b70"

Add to fstab mounting

...
UUID=fc7ec587-35e4-4726-815d-e1693cd89b70  /mnt/data        ext4        defaults        0 2
...

Check LVM RAID1 status

To check lvm raid status for volume group raid0vg0

Performance tunnig

It is possible to tunne performance for raid1. By default, in raid1 all disk have same rangs for read/write. If one of disks are much slower then another, it possible to improve WRITE performance (with small penalty of read performance) for such scenario with disabling read from slowest drive.

In such scenario, slowest drive will only write data (without reading), and faster drive will read/write data.

Logical volume raid0vg0/raid0lv0 changed.

Where /dev/sdb1 - physical drive in vg0 (slowest drive), raid0vg0 - volume group