OpenBSD Software RAID Administration
- Introduction
- Overview
- Installing OpenBSD
- Dealing with a Failed Component
- Upgrading OpenBSD
- Caveats
- References
Introduction
This document is meant to be a guide and reference for administrators using software RAID (RAIDframe) on OpenBSD. It covers operational issues such as how to setup RAIDframe during OpenBSD installation and how to recover a RAID set after a component in the RAID set fails. This document does not cover the internals of RAIDframe nor does it provide benchmarks or comparisons to other technologies or applications.
The reader is expected to be familiar with installing OpenBSD and with OpenBSD as a whole. The reader should be familiar with using fdisk(8) and disklabel(8).
This document is written for OpenBSD 3.6 and 3.7.
Overview
The setup being referenced throughout this document is an OpenBSD/i386 machine with two identical IDE hard drives, wd0 and wd1. The drives are mirrored using RAID level 1. The single RAID volume configured on the drives contains all of the "live" filesystems (/, /usr, /var, etc) and is also bootable.
Make note: Because the GENERIC OpenBSD kernel doesn't come with the RAIDframe driver built into it, it's necessary to compile your own kernel with that driver. Details are provided in the installation section.
References