Solaris / Resizing LVM PVs (was: Debian experiences)

[Tom Buskey]

On 11/4/06, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> [replying on-list to an off-list reply, with the author's permission]
>
> On 11/3/06, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> > If you're going to be trying things, try one of the BSD systems.
> > Solaris 10 (update 10 or OpenSolaris so you get ZFS)

> The firewalling stuff has some attraction for me -- OpenBSD's pf is
> supposed to be the best around -- but not quite enough.  Nothing

I've used OpenBSD for firewalls.  PF is excellent and I wish Linux
would adopt it.  It has been ported to FreeBSD and NetBSD FWIW.

>   Now, Solaris I haven't really used in just about forever, and the
> new "free" Solaris sounds interesting.  Hmmm.  That has some appeal to
> me.

ZFS and Dtrace are compelling enough.  They've been ported to FreeBSD.
 MacOSX 10.5 will have Dtrace and there are rumors of ZFS.

Zones are like Xen.  Sun has it so you can run Linux/Linux Binaries in
a Zone too.

>   One problem.  When I set-up the disks on my current PC, I used Linux
> LVM for everything except the Wintendo partition.  That lets me do
> things like try out three different distros at once, without needing
> to do much of anything to make room or reclaim it afterwards.  I have
> to say, it's works really well.
>
>   Except, of course, that I don't expect Solaris supports Linux LVM.
>
>   Does anyone know if there is a way to non-destructively resize a
> Linux LVM PV (Physical Volume)?

Something like pvreduce?

>   While I imagine this is technically possible, I expect this isn't
> something that exists.  That's why you have LVM in the first place, to
> avoid the need to resize partitions.
>
>   Here's my thinking:
>
>   One of my disks consists of a single giant primary partition, which
> is a Linux LVM PV.  I could easily free up a few dozen gigs for
> Solaris to play in on that disk.  But I don't have enough spare disk

9GB is enough for everything.  Solaris x86 even uses grub.

> space to move everything off that disk.  I'd like to be able to just
> reduce the size of the PV, and then reduce the size of the partition,
> and let Solaris have the rest of the disk.
>
>   (I think I might be able to make room in other ways, by moving
> things back and forth between the two disks in my system in creative
> ways, but it would be a hassle.)
>
>   Comments?

I've said it before that ZFS is well worth looking at.  When you
malloc some memory, do you worry about which SIMM or even if it comes
from virtual memory?  Why can't disk be like that?

RAM has ECC to catch hardware errors.  Why not disk?  Journaling helps
others but a bad cable/controller can silently corrupt data. Not ZFS.

Snapshoting?  RAID?  Volume Management?  Builtin.

I'm hoping for iSCSI target to be built into the production Solaris.
It's in OpenSolaris already.

Linux and the BSDs do better at package (& patch) management.  yum and
apt-get are not there for Solaris.