I am running two linux (Fedora 9) and one Windows XP guests on a Fedora 9 host. The system runs on four disk drives which are partitioned to create a small boot partition, a software (mdadm) raid0 swap file (8GB) across the four drives, a raid10 root partition for the host OS (50 GB ) and a raid5 parition (800 GB) with the guest OS files and my data.
Aabout twice a week, the mouse and keyboard in the linux guest freeze. If I have an ssh connection into the guest and the host I can occasionally shutdown the host but the guest is usually unresponsive. More often than not I have to do a hardware reset whcih is a problem because the raid5 array sometimes takes several hours to resync.
I decided on the raid aproach so that in case the system crashed I would have a first line of defense (I do also backup offsite every night). However I'm beginning to wonder whether the raid arrays are perhaps causing the problem. I'm nervous about going back to a simple volume group configuration on the host bcause if I'm wrong, I will still have the regular crashes and may then have to restore from backups which will take even longer.
I know this is a bit bizare but I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts?
