Mark and Richard, thanks for the information. I'm new to Linux and come from an IBM mainframe proprietary operating system heritage. I'm slowly realizing that the intended audience for these publications is not the IBM heritage guy, but the Linux guy who's now got to work on Z.
-----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Post Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 12:26 PM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: Re: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 Starter System for IBM System z >>> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 11:36 AM, in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED] l>, "Quay, Jonathan (IHG)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So I am proceeding along with the install and notice that the provided > CLIENT SAMPDIR shows a 50 cylinder 150 disk, with a 151 disk for the > rest of that pack and a 152 disk that's another full pack. I can't find > any rationale for this, or any further installation instructions that > take this into account. The SLES installation and admin guide shows a > single 150. What am I missing? Samples are just that, samples, not Holy Writ from ${DIETY}. You can, of course, choose to do anything you like. Since you're following the Virtualization Cookbook pretty closely, you might want to do things the way described there. My personal preference is to just give a guest minidisks defined as "1 to END" and be done with it. I then use Linux tools to divvy that up as desired. This also reduces the load on the z/VM systems programmer. Note also that the device numbers 0150-0152 were arbitrarily chosen. You don't need to maintain that, although having a numbering scheme that is used across your guests is highly recommended. Richard says he thinks 50 cylinders is too small for /boot. I disagree. On my systems, /boot is only using about 16MB, or roughly 23 cylinders, although it is part of /, and not broken out separately. SLES doesn't accumulate old kernels in /boot the way RHEL does, for good or ill. Again, my personal preference is to take a 3390-3, and create two partitions on it. One, about 400MB, to be used for the root file system, and the other to be given over to LVM. I take a second 3390-3, and put one partition on it, all to be used for LVM. I then create separate file systems for /home, /opt, /srv, /tmp, /usr, and /var. As Richard indicates, depending on what you're going to be doing with a particular system, two 3390-3 volumes may be a little skimpy, or just about right. If you're using 3390-9 volumes, then just one would be needed, with the two partitions on it for / and LVM. Whenever possible, I prefer to have those two volumes only be used for the operating system itself. Any add-on products, such as WebSphere, etc., or applications, would be installed in separate file systems created from a different LVM volume group, using different physical volumes. Mark Post
