Software RAID on Linux

Presented by:

Niladri Saha Amit Kumar Saha

College Roll No. 04/CSE/17 College Roll No. 04/CSE/20
Univ. Roll No. 10301041016 Univ. Roll No. 10301041022

Supervised by:

Mr. Soumen Paul, Lecturer

Department of CS & I
Haldia Institute of Technology
Haldia
1 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation
Agenda

Software RAID

Why RAID?

RAID setup

RAID Operations

Software RAID Tool

Ending notes..

2 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

 Software RAID

Software RAID is RAID implemented with

software - no additional hardware such as a
RAID controller is needed

Software RAID is a good starting point to
start getting some hands-on RAID experience

A software layer sits above the (generally
block-based) disk device drivers and provides
an abstraction layer between the logical drives
(RAID arrays) and physical drives
3 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation
 Why RAID?

RAID stands for Redundant Arrays of

Inexpensive Disks

The basic idea of RAID is to combine multiple
small, independent disk drives into an array of disk
drives which yields performance exceeding that of
a Single Large Expensive Drive (SLED)

4 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

RAID Setup on Linux

Preferably a Linux kernel from the 2.4 series or later

Tools for manipulating RAID, such as 'raidtools' and
'mdadm'

5 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Creating a usable RAID array

Creating the RAID array

$ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md5 --level=5 --raid-
devices=3 /dev/sda8 /dev/sda9 /dev/sda10

Creating the filesystem

$ sudo mke2fs /dev/md5

Mounting the RAID array

$ sudo mount /dev/md5 /media/RAID5

6 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

RAID performance tests

We conducted some basic tests to measure the

performance of a RAID– 5 array with respect to a
single disk device w.r.t the following parameters:

CPU usage

time taken

7 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

RAID performance tests

8 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

 RAID
Operations

9 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

 Querying the RAID array status

MDADM can be used to-

-Q, --query: Examine a device to see:

if it is an md device, and

if it is a component of an md array.

-D, --detail: Print detail of one or more md devices.

10 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Monitoring RAID arrays

mdadm is used to monitor a RAID array in simple

and effective way.

The following line shows how we can set it up:

$ mdadm --monitor --delay=1800 /dev/md5

There are two ways to specify the e-mail address (for
sending notifications):

Specify it using the –mail switch, or

Specify it the mdadm.conf file

11 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Simulating a drive failure

Simulating a drive failure allows you to test the

behavior of your RAID array when it fails- such as a
disk failure

Simulation can be done in two ways:

Force fail by hardware

Force fail by software. For eg:

$sudo mdadm --set-faulty /dev/md5 /dev/sda10, will set the device
/dev/sda10 faulty

12 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Software RAID
Tool

13 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Software RAID Tool

Working with a RAID is possible only by using

command line tools such as ’mdadm’

We have completed a working software tool which
wraps the major functionalities of ’mdadm’ in an easy
GUI

14 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

15 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation
16 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation
17 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation
18 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation
19 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation
Features

The Software RAID Tool currently has support for:

Creating a RAID device

Managing existing RAID devices

Conduct some Input/Output tests on RAID devices

Emulate Failures on RAID

Obtain existing RAID statistics

Help sets on Software RAID

20 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Implementation Details

Java Technologies
+
Native Linux utilities

21 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Implementation Details

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

NetBeans 6.1 Beta IDE was used for the development of
the software tool.

Java Technologies

Swing Application Framework

JavaHelp

Java API for XML Processing (JAXP)

eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

22 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Implementation Details

Native Linux utilities

mdadm

BASH scripting

time

dd

23 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Calling the native utilities/scripts
from Java

String cmdline = "/bin/sh raid-devs.sh";

try {
Process md_devs = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmdline);
..
}catch(Exception e){
System.out.println(e);
}

24 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Future improvements

Currently, the tool supports only the basic RAID

operations

The integration of the tool with the native utilities is
loose

25 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

Ending Notes

Theoretical aspects of software RAID and also

have experimented with the various aspects of
RAID- creation and management

Designed a tool for working with software RAID
which enables the user to avoid using the
command line for simple tasks

Used as a teaching aid in a software RAID course

26 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

References

Patterson, D. , Gibson, G. , Katz, Randy H. ,“A Case for

Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)”

Saha, A.K., “Hands-on Linux Software RAID”,
http://linuxgazette.net/150/saha.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

“The Software RAID How-To”,
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID- HOWTO.html

https://appframework.dev.java.net/

http://java.sun.com/products/javahelp/

27 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation

 Thank You!

28 Software RAID on Linux- Presentation