Creating LVM disk for MongoDB: Right or Not?

One of the benefits of using replicated environments is the option of having large high IOPS disks using commodity disks, without the need to create complex HA disk based solutions like RAID 10.

We wil demostrate this method by creatign a LVM based disk array.

Creating the LVM Disk Array
Based on environment w/ two disks:
/dev/xvdb
/dev/xvdc

0. Setup prequistions

sudo apt-get -y install lvm2 xfsprogs

1. Create physical volume for the two devices

sudo pvcreate /dev/xvdb /dev/xvdc

2. Create a Volume Group 

sudo vgcreate vg_data /dev/xvdb /dev/xvdc

3. Create new logical volume from all the space on the disks:

sudo lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n data vg_data

4. Create xfs file system

sudo mkfs.xfs -f /dev/vg_data/data

5. Mount the disk

sudo echo "/dev/vg_data/data /var/lib/mongodb xfs defaults 0 2" >> /etc/fstab && sudo mount -a 

sudo chown -R mongodb:mongodb /var/lib/mongodb

Note: This method may be effective only when you have large number of disks (>3) and relatively high disk space utilization. Otherwise, you may face high IOPS utilization only on part of the disks as can be seen below
avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           3.77    0.00    0.42    0.14    0.02   95.65
Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
xvda              0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
xvdb            176.00         0.00     21294.00          0      42588
xvdc              8.00         0.00        16.00          0         32

dm-0            170.00         0.00     20560.00          0      41120

Bottom Line
Choosing LVM can be a great soluton to support your big data intallation. However, you should test your case to verify it is the right solution for your needs,

Keep Perforrming,
Moshe Kaplan