[CentOS] Advice on partitioning a Dell MD1200 disk array

Tony Molloy tony.molloy at ul.ie
Wed Sep 5 19:02:17 UTC 2012


On Tuesday 04 September 2012 15:20:26 Paul Tader wrote:
> > The second MD1200 will be used to backup the first, using
> > BackupPC and for other storage purposes.
> >
> > As I won't know the storage requirements for the "backup
> > partition" and they will probably change over time anyway. I was
> > thinking of using LVM for it. So how to partition the MD1200 for
> > LVM. I don't want to put all 12 disks in  a RAID5 and put a LVM
> > volume on it. Can I split it into 2 RAID5 and have a LVM volume
> > spanning both.
> 
> Just a thought about the backup volume.
> 
> Because it going to be used for backups and your retirement
>  (congrats!) I would configure one partition and no volume
>  management on top.  Why? Because backups are like insurance
>  policies.  That are not fun and no one reviews them, but when you
>  need them, you really hope that everything is in order.  So you
>  don't want the next admin to find out several months or years down
>  the road that the backup software ran out of space and has been
>  failing to back anything up for the previous few months.
> 
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Thanks to Gotz, Blake, Paul and Nate for your advice.

I was pretty happy with the split RAID 5 for the NFS partitions on the 
first MD1200.

I think I'll go with the simple solution for the backup MD1200. A 
single RAID 5 encompassing all 12 disks probably with 2 hot spares. 
Put an ext4 on top of that without the complexity of LVM.

Thanks,

Tony

aside Paul, unfortunately my retirement is not voluntary. It's due to 
a spinal cord injury but such is life ;-)



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