[CentOS] C 7 installation annoyances

Tue Oct 16 05:00:48 UTC 2018
Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch>

> In the disk partitioner, I can't
>   1) choose to make the LVM with root and swap be on a RAID 1. Is there
>         some way to do that, rather than two separate partitions RAIDed?
>   2) They don't align, so I can't clone /dev/sda to /dev/sdb as a
>         failover (for /boot and /boot/efi). I've created those two,
> manually,
>         and nope, it wiped them out, so I can't clone those two.
>
> Any solutions for either of these? I don't have hardware RAID card on this
> box.

I was in the same boat with our newest servers. We went with all U.2 NVMe
systems without hardware RAID. Yes, we're running servers with and without
hardware RAID for decades now and we didn't regret our decision with two
exceptions:

1) the whole EFI thing seems a bit unfinished because it doesn't handle
our configuration well. Why should a newly developed system be so limited?

2) the EL7 installer didn't allow me to create the setup we wanted/needed

For 1) I found a workaround which should work quite well in our case.

For 2) my last resort was to install EL7 on a separate disk and then
build/convert/move the whole system to the required configuration.

It was quite a torture and I was a bit speechless. After decades of
running all kinds of Unix and Linux systems it felt like a step backwards.
It's nice if things improve to make our life easier, but it should still
be possible to do more complicated things, as it was the case in the older
days.

Regards,
Simon