[CentOS] Booting Software RAID

Thu Jan 30 21:27:16 UTC 2014
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

On Thu, 30 Jan 2014, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:

> Eight years ago, I wrote an article for SysAdmin, suggesting a 
> straight partition for /boot and root, and lvm for /home and /var, 
> and /usr. These days, I might say RAID 1 for /boot and /, and RAID 
> or not for swap, and another raid partition for everything else: 
> home, other data directories....

That's pretty much in line with our practice for standalone machines:

  * /boot -- RAID 1
  * /     -- RAID 1
  * /srv  -- RAID 1 or 5, and it may not even be broken out
  * /home -- NAS (RAID 10, if it matters)

For VMs, there's just swap and /.

> At work, we're going to not more than 500G for /, but I'm thinking a 
> lot less: I just rebuilt my own system at home, and gave / 150G, I 
> think, and I have /var there (though I'd put web stuff elsewhere 
> than on /).

A RAID 1 of (relatively) inexpensive 80GB or 120GB SSDs are my default 
for swap and the root filesystem. Larger /srv filesystems, and the NAS 
holding /home, still require spinning platters on our budget.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W