[CentOS] Suggestions for partition

Wed May 9 12:07:05 UTC 2007
Toby Bluhm <tkb at midwestinstruments.com>

Alfred von Campe wrote:
> The recent thread on Anaconda and RAID10 made me start to think about 
> how to partition a server I'm about to set up.  I have two 146GB SCSI 
> drives on an IBM x3550.  It will be used as a build system.  As such, 
> there is no critical data on these systems, as the source code will be 
> checked out of our source control system, and the build results are 
> copied to another system.  I usually build my systems with Kickstart, 
> so if a disk dies, I can rebuild it quickly.
>
> Given all that, how would you partition these disks?  I keep going 
> back and forth between various options (HW RAID, SW RAID, LVM, etc.).  
> I guess speed is more important to me than redundancy.  I'm tempted to 
> install the OS on one drive and use the entire second drive for data.  
> This way I can rebuild or upgrade the OS without touching the data.  
> But that will waste a lot of disk space, as the OS does not need 146GB.
>
> The only thing I'm pretty sure of is to put 2GB of swap on each drive, 
> but after that everything is still in the air.  I am looking for any 
> and all suggestions from the collective wisdom and experience of this 
> list.
>

Three raid1 sets:

raid1 #1 = /
raid1 #2 = swap
raid1 #3 = rest of disk on /home

for the simple fact that a dead disk won't bring down your system and 
halt your builds until your rebuild the machine. But if you really only 
care about max speed and are not worried about crashes & their 
consequences, then replace the raid1 with raid0.

I have no reason for using LVM on boot/OS/system partitions. If I have 
something that fills the disk that much, I move it to an other storage 
device. In your case, striped LVM could be used instead of raid0.

-- 
Toby Bluhm
Midwest Instruments Inc.
30825 Aurora Road Suite 100
Solon Ohio 44139
440-424-2250