As others have already said:
Don't use gpt or partition your disks if you are going to use LVM. LVM runs fine directly on top of what your PERC6/E presents the MD1000 disks as. I have a 2950 (and a PERC5/E) connected to a MD1000 that contains 9x 500GB (/dev/sdb) and 6x 1TB (/dev/sdc) disks in 2 raid5s. I originally started out with just the 500GB disks configured in a raid50 setup, that proved a dead end (no expansion!), so I added the 6 1TB disks and placed them in the same VG as the existing 500GB disks, did a single pvmove (that took a bit loong) to empty /dev/sdb, did a reorg to a raid5 and added the new raid5 back to the existing VG. I don't know if partitioning my original /dev/sdb could have prevented that, but I surely didn't need it. And yes - this was all done through SSH and a SSH tunnel to the OMSA webinterface where I reconfigured the 500GB disks. Never needed to put a hand on the hardware once I had installed the new 1TB disks. Oh, and without partitions I can easily grow all the filesystems when needed - without worring about existing partitionsizes - at the moment I've got ~2TB unoccupied space that every LVM partition can grab a chunk of when needed (and without taking the filesystem offline). Regards, Jens Dueholm Christensen Business Process and Improvement, Rambøll Survey IT ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Collins, Kevin L. Sent: 10. august 2009 17:53 To: Dell Poweredge list server Subject: Large File Systems, GPT, MD1000 I'm trying to deploy a system comprised of a PE1950 + PERC 6/E + MD1000 with 14x1 TB drives. I'm installing Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) server on the machine. Internally the PE1950 has a PERC 6i hooked to two 750GB drives in a RAID 1. That's where the OS will live. The MD1000 is simply gonna be used for storage - with LVM and XFS. Everything is recognized and is working. My problem comes in when I go to access the space on the MD1000. I created a single RAID10 array with a single hot-spare on the unit. This equates to about 6 TB of useable space. But using fdisk, I can only create a _single_ 2 TB partition. I'd obviously like to access all of the 6 TB. So, I've done a bit of research and found that to get past this limit, I need to use parted and GPT labeled drives. Which seems to be the proper way to get this done. But I've never used GPT labeled drives and I'm concerned about issues with failures, recoveries and expansions. Therefore, I'm calling on those with more experience than me to provide some guidance. I know that several people on this list maintain servers that access MUCH more space than this 6 TB. Any advice is welcomed. Questions: 1). Am I going down the proper road? 2). Is there a better way? 3). What hurdles will I need to overcome? Oh, one other little detail about this server. When it's deployed it will be in an offsite location with only SSH access, so making things easy is the goal here. Thanks in advance. -- Kevin L. Collins, MCSE Systems Manager nesbitt engineering, inc. 227 North Upper Street Lexington, KY. 40507 Direct Line: 859.685.4524 Cell: 859.317.1501
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