It looks like you already have a solution, but you could always create two arrays, mirroring the 500GB drives. Then, create / and /boot partitions from the 500GB mirror and put the rest of the 500GB + the remaining space in the array into an LVM and carve it up however you see fit. I suppose that would could work if you weren't using a 3ware card..
On 11/28/06, Kevan Benson kbenson@a-1networks.com wrote:
On Tuesday 28 November 2006 13:07, chrism@imntv.com wrote:
Kevan Benson wrote:
I have a 3.5 TB RAID 5 Array through a 3ware 9590SE 8 port card, and
am
running into what seems like quite a lot of problems trying to get the system installed correctly. The system is a running dual Opterons
with 2
GB of RAM, and I'm attempting to install through the x86_64 ServerCD.
First, grub refuses to install on the disk, as it's too large. I can
get
around this though by booting Fedora Core 6 in rescue mode and running grub, as it can deal with the disk size correctly. This might only be working when I attempt installs that don't utilize as much of the
array
as possible though (100 MB /boot, 2GB swap, 10Gb /, the rest left unallocated).
Secondly, there seems to be a problem using msdos disk labels with
large
partitions, and I can't seem to find any solutions to this in the
manuals
or on the net. GPT labels are offered as a solution to this but only
for
Itanium systems.
Am I missing some obvious solution to this? Are there some best practices for dealing with large disks anyone can share that may save
me
problems now or later? I'm open to suggestions, as all I've
encountered
so far are problems.
On two different systems with hardware similar to yours, I ended up using 2 different solutions. :) On one, I simply replaced 2 of the 750gig 'cudas in an 8 disk array with 160gig drives and then created a RAID1 on those 2 drives for the OS. After the OS was installed, I then used parted to create the gpt label on the large array and created the filesystem on it.
On another system, I really needed the ports on the 3ware for the array so I installed a pair of 160gig drives using a cheapo dual port SATA card and used software RAID 1 on those two drives for the OS install. After the system was installed, I then used parted to create the GPT label on the large array and created the filesystem on it.
If you go back through the list archives a bit, you'll see a bunch of very useful information from a couple of months ago where a number of people offered excellent tuning suggestions. If you get stuck, shoot me some email off list and I'll see if I can give you a hand.
Thanks for all the suggestions, and to Joshua for mentioning 3ware's carving, which I wasn't aware of before this.
Carving with LVM to append portions into a large LV seems to be the solution I'm leaning towards, as it seems to be the easiest to implement "out of the box" and I expect it will cause the least issues in the long run as there's no room in the chassis for more drives (it also has a tape drive) and dedicating one or two 500 GB drives to an install array seems wasteful.
--
- Kevan Benson
- A-1 Networks
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos