On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Troy Dawson wrote:
If these are beginning linux admins who don't know about partitions,
or haven't done linux partitioning, then you shouldn't do LVM first.
You should teach them about partitions, and the general layout of
Linux partitions. Your general windows admin isn't going to know
about /boot or swap partitions. Your general unix admin will know
about how his version of unix partitioning, and will appreciate
knowing what partitions linux should have. And if they aren't an
admin, then they aren't going to know about partitions at all.
If this is a bunch of Debian admins wanting to know RedHat, then go
straight to LVM.
i've decided i can combine the best of both worlds. given that
/boot is still allocated as a regular primary partition, i can use
that to talk about partitions, while still using LVM for the remainder
of the disk layout. i think that will solve the problem.
I've not checked if it is still the case in EL6 but the default installer
for EL4/5 strongly encourages people to always use the same 'VG' name when
setting up LVM.
IMHO this is a pain because if people follow that pattern then if/when a
disk is moved to another machine (e.g. temporarily for diagnostics) the VG
names on the disks clash.
While there are ways round that problem it (seems to me) best to avoid it
by allocating unique names for the VGs (we base them on the hostname and
purpose e.g. system VG in 'fox' might be FoxSys0 - the mixed case is on
purpose so they can't clash with other dev entries...)
Also the LV names that the installer suggests are just plain stupid. I
much prefer to name them after the purpose - they don't need to be unique
so I usually use the name of the mountpoint (or root for / and swap for
swap).
Apart from /boot we prety much use LVM for everything (sometimes with md
sometimes with hardware-raid). I've not noticed a significant performance
hit. A few weeks ago one of the people here (not me) ran some tests with
sl5 on some Dell R510 boxes with H700 controllers each driving 12x2TB SAS
disks and any difference were lost in the noise between runs.
-- Jon (yet another control freak)
