[CentOS] C7: How to configure raid at install time

Fri Nov 20 16:45:56 UTC 2015
Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer at gmail.com>

On 11/18/2015 08:07 PM, Fred Smith wrote:
> Can anyone provide (or give pointers to) a good recipe for doing this?

One of the things I'm working on right now is moving toward a single 
standard partition layout for all systems, with RAID or without. The 
reason I want to do that is that it'll allow me to script the 
replacement of a failed drive, both so that I don't fat-finger it and so 
that our on-call staff can reasonably expect to replace a drive.

In order to do that, I set up GPT on all drives, regardless of whether 
they are used in BIOS systems or UEFI.  On BIOS systems, the first 
partition is a bios_boot partition, and on UEFI, it's an EFI system 
partition.  The next partition is a small slice for RAID1 /boot.  The 
last partition is a member of whatever RAID level is appropriate for the 
system.

There are a couple of limiting factors on that.  First, Anaconda won't 
create a large partition for bios_boot.  Second, even in kickstart, 
Anaconda will reorder partitions.   So, I can't use Anaconda to create 
partitions and achieve a uniform layout.

I use this kickstart file for initial setup:
http://home.dragonsdawn.net/kickstart/centos7

And this script to replace drives:
http://home.dragonsdawn.net/kickstart/add-raid-member

I still haven't decided how I'm going to handle EFI system partitions in 
the replacement script and otherwise, so this system is incomplete.  But 
if people want to take a look and comment, I'd be interested in discussion.