SUMMARY: to use or not to use: LSM

From: Norris, Daniel (Daniel.Norris@gentiva.com)
Date: Thu Oct 10 2002 - 12:30:54 EDT


Thanks to everyone that sent me opinions and ideas.

Most people thought that using LSM for my scenario was going to cause
more problems, increase the number of management tasks, and potentially
increase risk (more single points of failure). More than one person
responded that they wouldn't use LSM because of a bad experience in
which LSM metadata was corrupted and they lost data or had to recover
from backups. Almost everyone cited the savings on licensing costs as
a reason not to use LSM, but we'll still be using it for mirroring our
OS filesystems since they are not part of any HW raid array.

Thanks again for all the input.

Here's the original query:

Hi,
  
I wanted to get opinions on advantages and disadvantages of using LSM in
a configuration where we will be using HSG80s to provide mirror pairs to
the OS. LSM would not be used for mirroring and there would be no DRL
configured either. All LSM would do is "manage" the disk (unit) in its
own disk group and create one volume from that disk that was the same
size as the whole disk.

  
I am having trouble seeing the benefit of using LSM in this
configuration, but I thought someone could open my eyes to whatever I
may be missing. In fact, I thought that going through the LSM driver
stack would likely degrade performance by a couple of percent overall
(we have many disks, disk groups, volumes on our system).
 

Dan Norris
Unix Engineering, Gentiva
Celeritas Technologies, LLC
913-814-2675



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