Creating a RAID device on Amazon AWS Elastic

Following procedure is for creating a software (OS managed) RAID disk devices.
EBS (Amazon web services elastic block storage) does not provide any RAID abilities by itself.
But you can use Linux SW raid option to increase either speed or device redundancy.
This tutorial will show you how.

First install RAID management tool on target EC2 instances

For Debian based (Debian, Ubuntu) execute: 
apt-get install mdadm
For Red Hat based (RHEL, Oracle linux, CentOS) execute:
yum install mdadm
For Gentoo execute:
emerge mdadm

Now prepare the EBS devices.

Create desired EBS volume
Attach new EBS volumes to EC2 instance and write down the device name (for example xvdf and xvdg)

Now you can create the RAID device from them.

Set up RAID 0 on this EBS instance with the following command:
  mdadm --create --verbose --auto=yes /dev/md0 --chunk=256 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/xvdf /dev/xvdg
   blockdev --setra 65536 /dev/md0

Now verify that the raid device /dev/md0 exists
cat /proc/mdstat

Next step is to add devices to the mdadm.conf file (main sw raid configuration file)
   echo DEVICE /dev/xvdf /dev/xvdg | sudo tee /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
 
Add the other device info about /dev/md0 to the mdadm.conf file so that it comes back on reboot
   mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Filesystem

One RAID is set up , you can create a file-system on it, we usually propose XFS, but you can use any file system (ext3/4, zfs or reiserfs)
  
To create XFS file system, you will need to install support for it first.
For Debian based (Debian, Ubuntu) execute: 
apt-get install xfsprogs
For Red Hat based (RHEL, CentOS) execute:
yum install xfsprogs
For Oracle Linux:
Log in to ULN, and subscribe your system to the ol6_x86_64_latest channel.
Then run:
yum install xfsprogs xfsdump 
For Gentoo execute:
emerge xfsprogs 

Once installed, execute
mkfs.xfs -f /dev/md0
to create an actual filesystem on your new RAID device.
  
Now you can mount the file system
   mkdir /MOUNTPOINT (for example /raid)
   mount /dev/md0 /MOUNTPOINT (for example /raid)
 
Verify the volume exists and the size you expected
df -h 
 
Edit /etc/fstab to make sure mount point comes back on reboot
/dev/md0 /raid xfs noatime,noexec,nodiratime 0 0

You have the new RAID based partition in your system.
Same procedure will work on both public EC2 cloud and VPC.

Provided by:Forthscale systems, cloud experts