Create Linux RAID1 Mirror Using Mdadm.

 

Firstly you need to install ‘mdadm’ utility on our system, if not installed already

$ yum install mdadm
After installing ‘mdadm’, we will prepare our disks sdc & sdd for RAID configuration with the help of ‘fdisk’

  • Firstly we will prepare /dev/sdc disk for LVM, start by
  • Type ‘n’ for creating a new partition,
  • Next type ‘p’ for creating the primary partition (since this is a new disk, partition number will be 1 )
  • Nest for First cylinder value & last cylinder value, press enter to use default values i.e. full HDD space
  • Type ‘t’ for accessing the partition followed by ‘1’ (partition number)
  • Now, this is the part where we will enter the partition id for creating RAID i.e. ‘fd’. Type ‘fd’ now & press ‘w’ to write changes.
  • The same process is to be followed for /dev/sdc as well. When both disks have been partitioned, we can examine them usingThe same process is to be followed for /dev/sdd as well. When both disks have been partitioned, we can examine them using

    Now that we partitioned both HDDs, we will create RAID array (aka md device) named ‘/dev/md1’ using the following command

    mdadm –create /dev/md1 –level=mirror –raid-devices=2 /dev/sd[c-d]1

    We will now verify our RAID array by running the following command

    $ cat /proc/mdstat/dev/sd[c-d]1
    For complete details regarding the RAID 1 array, we use the following command

    $ mdadm –detail /dev/md1
    RAID array is ready but still can’t be used as we have not assigned it a filesystem & have not mounted it on our system. So we will assign a filesystem first using ‘mkfs’ command

    $ mkfs.ext4 /dev/md1

    & next we will mount it on /data,

    $ mkdir /data
    $ mount /dev/md1 /data

    But this is only a temporary mount & will not survive a reboot. So we will make an entry into /etc/fstab

    $ vi /etc/fstab

    /dev/md1                /data              ext4    defaults         0 0

    Save & exit the file. Our RAID array is now permanently mounted to /data.

    Lastly, we will create backup of the RAID configuration in order to use it further

    $ mdadm -E -s -v >> /etc/mdadm.conf
    $ mdadm –detail –scan –verbose >> /etc/mdadm.conf
    $ cat /etc/mdadm.conf

    Note : I have tested this on AWS  using CentOS it worked well for me

    Thank you,
    Nuwan Vithanage