[TriLUG] LVM2 recovery options . . .

[Greg Cox]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 5:29 PM, Justin Parker <xjparkerx at gmail.com> wrote:

> But I am experimenting and trying to plan ahead.


At the risk of tripping over my own pet peeve of someone ducking the
original question and instead answering a tangent, I'd say one of the best
things you can do to maximize your recovery chances is to make a setup less
likely to fail catastrophically.  Avoid letting LVM make your layout info
unreachable.

Or: there is no practical reason for / to be inside an LV.

Personally, I run a 100M / from sda1, with swap on sda2 sized for the
hardware, and then a decent chunk of space on sda3 that's the base PV for a
VG that I carve /usr and /var (possibly /opt) out of.  /home is automounted
from another VM.  Your mileage will vary on sizes, but, if you do good
layout to start, the lack of ability to easily resize / becomes a
non-issue.  Then, you usually don't have huge issues getting / up to work
from for recovery when LVM craps its bed.

I'd suggest squirreling away a copy of vgcfgbackup off-box.  If you're
working on clones of a golden VM LUN, you might get this for free by
checking another copy, but, can't hurt to have.