[CentOS] Booting Software RAID

Thu Jan 30 19:43:36 UTC 2014
Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com>

On 01/30/2014 12:28 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
>>> My (sometimes unpopular) advice is to set up the partitions on servers
>>> into two categories:
>>>
>>> 1) OS
>>> 2) Data
>> Absolutely. I have been doing this, without problems, for 5 years.
>> Keeping the two distinct is best, in my opinion.
> Exactly. Why would this be an unpopular piece of advice?
>
> It might even be better to keep the OS by itself on one disk (with /boot, /
> and swap) and have the data on a separate disk.
>
> Please enlighten me!

I think the somewhat unpopular part is to recommend *against* using LVM 
for the OS partitions, voting instead to KISS, and only use LVM / Btrfs 
/ ZFS for the "data" part. Some people actually think LVM should be used 
everywhere.

And for clarity's sake, I'm not suggesting a literal partition /os and 
/data, simply that there are areas of the filesystem used to store 
operating system stuff (EG: /bin, /boot, /usr), and areas used to store 
data (EG: /home, /var, /tmp), etc.

Keep the OS stuff as simple as possible, RAID1 against bare partitions, 
etc. because when things go south, the last thing you want is *another* 
thing to worry about.

Keep the data part such that you can grow as needed without (much) 
downtime. EG: LVM+XFS, ZFS, etc. (And please verify your backups regularly)

-Ben