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Is Thin LVM stable & ready for production?
Thin LVM has been around for a long time now, but I never used it in production feeling it was still beta, you could mess up things pretty badly if you ever really run out of disk space and you probably want to keep meta-data on a separate RAID1 disk and keep off-server backups just in case something goes wrong. Also, at least at the time, there were only few recovery options and tools if something went wrong - even a simple power outage could cause major headaches for data on thin provisioned LVM.
So I wanted to ask if some of you are using it in production and if yes, what your experiences with it are?
Comments
Is anything really production ready?
Tried it but as you've mentioned, I also don't feel particularly well since I have little server admin knowledge so disaster recovery from PEBKAC errors is a no go for me atm.
If you run out of diskspace in your VG you're fucked.
Francisco
It depends, if you sell very cheap VPS and you need to oversell disk space to make a profit it's an option but you'll have to monitor disk space very carefully.
I always wonder though what people mean with 'production'. Would I use it in a hospital to operate a lung machine? No obv. not. Would I use it to host a website that can afford a little bit of downtime each month then sure why not as long as you create backups.
yes, that has to be closedly monitored as you could run out of disk space even without overselling (fstrim not running etc). But how is the performance?
even if I do not want to oversell (say I create the thin LVM 1,5-2x the physical space I have, but allocate (and use) only the physically space I have so as to be able to create snapshots or do very short-term work requiring space), thin provisioning would help e. g. with snapshots.
just like @sdglhm did :-)
Would you fly with an airline that tolerates pilot errors? Would you fly with a no-frills airline?
We use it in production in our Proxmox clusters since at least 3 years and it performs very well. Also snapshots are faster than standard logical volumes.
thank you for the feedback. Any experience with recovery?
We had an issue with a full thin volume, we expanded it and then repaired with lvconvert --repair without any problems.