[lug] LVM and disk failure

[Daniel Webb]

I've been Googling for the answer to this and failing, so:

What happens when you have a 2-disk LVM volume group and disk 1 fails?
Obviously this will depend on the filesystem you put on top of the volume,
right?  So which filesystems will recover gracefully if you chop them in half
like that?

It's a little disturbing that in all the documentation I've read on LVM this
is never mentioned, and yet it seems to destroy the main purpose of lvm: to be
able to add and remove disks to a volume easily.  Each physical volume you add
makes it that much more likely that you'll lose the whole thing.  Sure, you
can put it on top of RAID, but now you lost your size flexibility because RAID
isn't so easy to resize (or is it?).  The snapshots feature is nice, that's
all I'll use it for until I find a satisfactory answer to this question.

I also was checking out evms and it looks very interesting.  Any impressions
from those who have used it?  Is it stable/reliable?  I didn't see anything in
their docs either about recovering when one disk in a volume fails.