Quote:
[...] I've had a bad experience with our older p-series servers. When a disk failed in the rootvg the server became extremely busy trying to correct the problem which resulted in a software crash.
Hopefully if the disks is handled by a RAID controller this will not be a problem.
As long as you maintain a correctly mirrored rootvg an AIX server will not run into deep trouble when one disk fails. That a server becomes "extremely busy" after a disk went missing sounds like the server was trying to find information that was not on the remaining disk.
So for reasons of safe operation there is rarely a need for a physical raid adapter. If you are new to AIX and unsure about how to use mirroring, you might use the
mirrorvg command to mirror your rootvg. This has the advantage over
mklvcopy that one cannot forget to mirror the boot device hd5 or the paging space.
When you add an LV later make sure that you tell LVM to create 2 copies (default is just 1 - even if the VG is mirrored already, leaving you with a partly mirrored VG) and place each copy on a separate disk. This way you will hardly run into dire straits when a disk goes missing.