On Tue, 27 Jun 2000, Jim Wise wrote:

> OK, I'm pretty familiar with RAIDFrame (read: am using it semi-heavily
> in production), and have read the papers on both RAIDFrame and Vinum.  
> Can those in the know comment on what, if anything, Vinum provides that
> RF does not?  Vice versa?
> 
> Not trying to stoke any flames, just curious to see a comparison of the
> two.

I'm not sure of the details of Vinum, but RIDFrame and LVM's in general
are trying to solve different problems. Raid stuff is trying to be a disk,
while LVMs are creating partitions.

> To start the ball rolling, things which I like about RF include:
> 
>   * Simple configuration
>   * / on RAID, and component based RAID autoconfig (though I am not
>     using this in production at the moment)

Not quite fair as the initial post was about porting Vinum to NetBSD. :-)

>   * orthogonal/flexible (RAID of RAIDs?  No problem!)

This feature makes sense for what RAID is doing, but I'm not sure it makes
sense for what LVMs do.

>   * good integration into NetBSD

See above about porting. :-)

>   * good performance


The thing I like about LVMs is stuff I've done with AIX. I was able to
grow logical volumes on the fly, and then grow the file system to take
advantage of the extra space. There were times I started a program,
realized it would run out of space, and grew the partition before the
program ran out of space. :-)

Take care,

Bill