Setting up a RAID on EC2

At home, I have my operating system drive setup in RAID 0 (striped). The advantage of this, of course, is that read and write speed is appreciably increased (my benchmarks show the array to be about 1.7x as fast as either drive on its own (mind you, I am using older drives, and they are not quite matching either). The downside of this setup, is that I double my risk of device failure leading to data loss – luckily there are no irreplaceable files on the array, and the system is imaged regularly.

Given this degree of speed increase, and the fact that Amazon permits an essentially unlimited number of EBS drives, it seems logical that one might wish to explore the possibility of setting up an EBS RAID. While this should result in a speed increase, I haven’t bothered to actually benchmark it. The benchmarks I have read do tend to indicate a speed increase, although, there are some that disagree. Given the apparent reliability of EBS and the easy of backup, data loss should not be a critical concern. The one possible downside, however, is that splitting the IO between two disks increases the total number of IO operations.

I opted to use the XFS file system (the xfsprogs package), as it seemed best suited to my needs, and permits for easy resizing of the filesystem when the need arises.

In order to setup the RAID array, you must first create two (or more, I went with just two) EBS volumes. These must then be attached to a running instance.

Using mdadm, create a RAID array from the attached volumes:

#mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdh1 /dev/sdh2

Finally, format the new device:

#mkfs -t xfs /dev/md0

All that needs to be done now, is to mount the device and begin using it.

Following termination of the image, you will need to reattach the volumes. Ideally, this is done through a script that runs at startup which executes ec2-attach-volume for each volume.

You must then reassemble the RAID:

#mdadm --assemble --verbose /dev/md0 /dev/sdh1 /dev/sdh2

BEFORE I could use mdadm --assemble, I found it necessary to run:

#depmod -a
#modprobe raid0

Once these steps finish, mount the device, and you are good to go.
To undo the above steps (e.g. when shutting down):

#/bin/umount $MOUNT_POINT
#mdadm -S /dev/md0
#ec2-detach-volume $VOL1
#ec2-detach-volume $VOL2

To resize a RAID volume, create a snapshot, and then, using the AWS console, create a volume from the snapshot specifying the new size of the volume.

Attach the volumes to your instance, using ec2-attach-volume (e.g. as /dev/sdh3 and /dev/sdh4)

Assemble, check, and mount the array:

#mdadm --assemble --verbose /dev/md1 /dev/sdh3 /dev/sdh4
#xfs_check /dev/md1
#mount -t xfs /dev/md1 /raid1

If an array error occurs, use:

#xfs_admin -U generate /dev/md1

If the device is locked, unlock using:

#fuser -km /dev/md1

Finally, resize the array using:

#xfs_growfs -d /raid1