Handbook obsolescence scan: "The vinum Volume Manager"

[Frank Leonhardt]

On 25/06/2013 18:47, Warren Block wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jun 2013, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
>
>> On 25/06/2013 16:43, Warren Block wrote:
>>> Next on the list of potentially outdated things in the Handbook: 
>>> "The vinum Volume Manager", a whole chapter on vinum. Actually, it 
>>> is really now about gvinum.
>>>
>>> Are there any situations where new users should be advised to use 
>>> gvinum rather than ZFS or gconcat/gstripe/gmirror?
>>>
>>> What reasons are there for this chapter to remain in the Handbook 
>>> given the newer, simpler alternatives?
>>>
>>> If the information should remain, why should it be separate from the 
>>> GEOM chapter?
>>
>> I remember reading this and the gmirror stuff at the same time and 
>> wondering what it was all about. Whilst I'm generally not in favour 
>> of chucking stuff out of a manual if it exists on the ground, at the 
>> very least this could do with a sanity warning. At the time I had no 
>> way of knowing whether one method or the other was deprecated. I 
>> suppose I made a lucky guess.
>
> That is exactly the problem with old information.  gvinum still works, 
> but there is little reason to recommend it over the newer solutions.
>
> Rather than just removing this chapter, it could be converted to a 
> separate article, along with an added introduction about when it was 
> removed from the Handbook and why.

Off list here -

Couldn't agree more! In fact the whole disk mirroring thing still 
confuses me, as there are too many options and no guide for choosing 
between them. As far as I understand it, gmirror is the way to go in 
most cases because you end up with two identical drives, either of which 
can be salvaged from the wreckage after a crash, stuck in to another PC 
and booted. ZFS is the solution if you want to spread lots of data 
across lots of drives.

Actually, in practical terms, I don't see why ZFS is better than pairs 
(or threes) of gmirrored drives mounted on to one file system in the 
traditional way. Perhaps I just don't get it, or perhaps I'm just too 
traditional to give up on the idea that it's good to know which drive a 
particular file is on.

And then there's are the options for striping, which I avoid in favour 
of mirroring because disks are big and cheap now, and a RAID-5 crash is 
a PITA.

So yes - please do anything to help make sense of this. It needs someone 
who knows about all the options to compare them properly. I'm sorry to 
say that I've only ever bothered with what works for me.

Regards, Frank.