On Fri, 28 Aug 2009 at 1:03pm, Götz Reinicke - IT-Koordinator wrote
fdisk and parted fail to create any information on the device or fail completely.
You can't use fdisk on a volume that large. parted should work fine. What was the error you were getting (exactly)? For a volume that large, you must use a GPT disk label, not the default msdos one.
But, I can't create a filesystem on it:
mkfs.ext3 -m 2 -j -O dir_index -v -b 4096 -L iscsi2lvol0 /dev/mapper/VolGroup02-lvol0
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006) mkfs.ext3: Filesystem too large. No more than 2**31-1 blocks (8TB using a blocksize of 4k) are currently supported.
As has been pointed out, you need to use "-F" to force mkfs.ext3 to make a filesystem bigger than 8TB. IMHO, this is misleading. Filesystems up to 16TB are fully supported in centos >5.1, so I don't see why the upstream vendor left the requirement for "-F" in mkfs.ext3.
So my question: What is my missunderstanding or what's wrong with my system? Where are the real limits? Do I have to switch the OS to 64 Bit?
You do not have to switch to 64bit, and your setup should be fully supported. Other folks have mentioned XFS, and that's an option. But if you want to stay fully compatible with upstream, then ext3 is your only option.