RAID (redundant array of independent disks, originally redundant array of inexpensive disks) is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit. Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways called "RAID levels", depending on the level of redundancy and performance required.
The term "RAID" was first defined by David Patterson, Garth A. Gibson, and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. Marketers representing industry RAID manufacturers later attempted to reinvent the term to describe a redundant array of independent disks as a means of disassociating a low-cost expectation from RAID technology.
RAID is now used as an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple physical drives: RAID is an example of storage virtualization and the array can be accessed by the operating system as one single drive. The different schemes or architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a number (e.g. RAID 0, RAID 1). Each scheme provides a different balance between the key goals: reliability and availability, performance and capacity. RAID levels greater than RAID 0 provide protection against unrecoverable (sector) read errors, as well as whole disk failure.
Target
Using RAID technology enables hard disk failure caused by server downtime. The experiment requires four SCIS hard drive, boot partition as the boot partition is not supported, can only be installed on the RAID-1. / Partition and SWAP partition using RAID-10.
/boot RAID-1 50M
/ RAID-10 7.45G
Swap RAID-10 500MB
Create a new Ubuntu Server in VMware WorkStation
About RAID troubleshooting, please refer to RAID Troubleshooting.
Thanks for the information. Can you please explain, why the swap partition is denoted as RAID 1. you have said in begining that going to configure swap partition and / partition as RAID 10.
swap partition really should be using RAID 10, is my configuration process has generated mistake and now I have corrected this mistake, thanks for your correction.
Thanks for making the changes asap. one more correction in screenshot require. you need to show to choose 4 active devices for swap. i.e sda2, sdb2, sdc2, sdd2. Currenly it shows only sda2, sdb2. that is still RAID 1. Additionally, i tested this scenario with a virtual vmware disk (vmdk). and found little trouble with fixing on faultydisk. suppose if sda drive goes fault. ( I just removed the disk 1 of vmdk in vmware and tested.) . The hotspare automatically goes one level up. ex: md0 raid array looks like sda1, sdb1,sdc1 . and newly added disk shows as spare devices.
can you please explain how to replace a faulty drive along with the screenshot. how to copythe partition table, how to know if grub is loaded on spare device, if not how to load grub with newly installed drive., this would be great and consider complete raid 10 instruction you provided which no ever found so clear.
Thanks and i appreciate your publish.
Thanks for your appreciation, about RAID fault simulation and routine maintenance, I have posted, please refer to http://www.mrxuri.com/index.php/2013/10/03/raid-troubleshooting.html
I tried to follow your instruction on my new server and failed. After reboot the system cannot find bootable drive(s). I did some research online and it seems related to GPT and UEFI. I am using 4 3TB hard drive so I need GPT for that.
I still don't have a solution yet.
Thank you for the tutorial! I followed it for installing 12.04 alternative on a home server that has an SII3124 RAID 4 port controller. I did not use the fakeraid, only the soft raid described above. Installation went smoothly, however, the server will not boot. I ran boot-repair and it made no changes to the server. Boot repair did create a report:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/8740911/
What on earth am I doing wrong?