Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks [SOLVED]

2007-10-24 Thread Anup Shukla

Peter Kjellstrom wrote:


Reconsider the multiple 500G part. Slicing a raid-set up typically has bad 
performance effects (how bad depends on the controller). This results from 
that linux now considers several parts of your one raidset as devices to be 
scheduled independently.




Ok, looks like i am not done yet then.
I would like to spend some more time trying to do a performance 
benchmark. But, unfortunately, time is the constraint here for me.


Still, given the suggestion, i will surely try to reduce the number of 
slices.


Thank you for the information.

Regards,
A.S


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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks [SOLVED]

2007-10-24 Thread Morten Torstensen

Anup Shukla wrote:
Still, given the suggestion, i will surely try to reduce the number of 
slices.


I would make one system LUN at say 20GB and one data LUN with the rest 
of the RADI5 space.


On the system LUN I would make a /boot filesystem and a LVM partition 
with at least a / filesystem and swap. Usually I make /, /usr, /opt, 
/home, /var and /tmp but it varies a bit depending on what kind of 
machine it is.


The data LUN I would use as a PV directly for LVM and not bother with 
partitions at all.


//Morten

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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks

2007-10-24 Thread Anup Shukla

Morten Torstensen wrote:

Anup Shukla wrote:
Still, given the suggestion, i will surely try to reduce the number of 
slices.


I would make one system LUN at say 20GB and one data LUN with the rest 
of the RADI5 space.


On the system LUN I would make a /boot filesystem and a LVM partition 
with at least a / filesystem and swap. Usually I make /, /usr, /opt, 
/home, /var and /tmp but it varies a bit depending on what kind of 
machine it is.


The data LUN I would use as a PV directly for LVM and not bother with 
partitions at all.




I created 500G slices. Partitioned and mounted them
Then did a simple
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/data1 bs=1k count=120
This gave me a speed of over 150MB/s

Then i deleted entire RAID thing.. recreate 2 LUNs
30G, and whatever is left.

Create a PV on the bigger drive with 1 VG and 3 LVs of equal sizes.

Format and run the dd command again.
The speed is 130MB/s now.

Its a bit confusing.
Does LVM slow down things? Or i did something that is not really of any 
relevance to check IO speed.


I used mkfs.ext3 -m0 -E stride=96 -O dir_index /dev/sdb1 ...
I have a RAID5 volume consisting of 6 disk with stripe size = 64k
I hope the stride=96 is optimal.

Should i stick with LVM, or go back to the older way?

Thank you.

Regards,
A.S
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks

2007-10-24 Thread Anup Shukla

Anup Shukla wrote:


I created 500G slices. Partitioned and mounted them
Then did a simple
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/data1 bs=1k count=120
This gave me a speed of over 150MB/s

Then i deleted entire RAID thing.. recreate 2 LUNs
30G, and whatever is left.

Create a PV on the bigger drive with 1 VG and 3 LVs of equal sizes.

Format and run the dd command again.
The speed is 130MB/s now.

Its a bit confusing.
Does LVM slow down things? Or i did something that is not really of any 
relevance to check IO speed.


I used mkfs.ext3 -m0 -E stride=96 -O dir_index /dev/sdb1 ...
I have a RAID5 volume consisting of 6 disk with stripe size = 64k
I hope the stride=96 is optimal.

Should i stick with LVM, or go back to the older way?

Thank you.



On second thoughts, i have gone completely off-topic now.
It isn't CentOS anymore.

So it would be appropriate for me to end this topic here.

Thanks for the help.

Regards,
A.S

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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks

2007-10-24 Thread Morten Torstensen

Anup Shukla wrote:

Format and run the dd command again.
The speed is 130MB/s now.


It can vary a quite a bit depending on where you hit the disk. Remember, 
what you are testing is just how fast dd can read from /dev/zero and 
write to the file in a filesystem with 1k blocks. How that will map to 
real performance is another matter.



Its a bit confusing.
Does LVM slow down things? Or i did something that is not really of any 
relevance to check IO speed.


LVM adds very little overhead. The file and placement on disk can have 
more to do with raw I/O bandwidth than anything else in this particular 
scenario.



I used mkfs.ext3 -m0 -E stride=96 -O dir_index /dev/sdb1 ...
I have a RAID5 volume consisting of 6 disk with stripe size = 64k
I hope the stride=96 is optimal.


Depends what you want... With 4k blocks in ext3 (default) a stride of 16 
(16 times 4 is 64) would read one stripe from a disk. With 6 disk 16 
times 6 is 96, so for every I/O you will hit each disk once and read one 
stripe. Ditto for writes. In general that is a good start.



Should i stick with LVM, or go back to the older way?


I would never really consider not using LVM. The flexibility it adds for 
disk management is essential for managing your disks.


//Morten

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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread James A. Peltier

Anup Shukla wrote:

Hi All,

Sorry if this has been answered many times.
But i have been going through a lot of pages (via google search).
The more i search, the more its confusing me.

I have a server with 6 (750G each) SATA disks with H/W Raid 5.

I plan to allocate the space as follows

swap 8G
/boot 100M
/ 20G
-- and remaining space to /data{1,2,3,N} (equal sizes)

However after the installation and reboot, i got an error about bad 
partition for /data8


I had hit the 2T limit.

Then i found this page at 
http://www.knowplace.org/pages/howtos/linux_large_filesystems_support.php


which speaks of using Parted/LVM2 and XFS.

If i understand this correctly,
I need to have 1 disk to host the CentOS installation.
And i can use the other 5 disks in a RAID array
(label type gpt...)

Is it not possible to partition and use the existing RAID 5 volume?

I really am not sure about how to proceed for this big disk problem.

Any ideas/links will really help.

Thank you.

Regards,
A.S
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My understanding is that grub and lilo are not able to boot off of GPT 
labeled disks currently.  Given the size of currently available disks, 
this will probably change soon, however, for now you need a small 
partition to boot a large disk.


--
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Technical Director, RHCE
SCIRF | GrUVi @ Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-3610
Fax : 778-782-3045
Mobile  : 778-840-6434
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Anup Shukla

James A. Peltier wrote:

James A. Peltier wrote:

Anup Shukla wrote:

Hi All,

Sorry if this has been answered many times.
But i have been going through a lot of pages (via google search).
The more i search, the more its confusing me.

I have a server with 6 (750G each) SATA disks with H/W Raid 5.

I plan to allocate the space as follows

swap 8G
/boot 100M
/ 20G
-- and remaining space to /data{1,2,3,N} (equal sizes)

However after the installation and reboot, i got an error about bad 
partition for /data8


I had hit the 2T limit.

Then i found this page at 
http://www.knowplace.org/pages/howtos/linux_large_filesystems_support.php 



which speaks of using Parted/LVM2 and XFS.

If i understand this correctly,
I need to have 1 disk to host the CentOS installation.
And i can use the other 5 disks in a RAID array
(label type gpt...)

Is it not possible to partition and use the existing RAID 5 volume?

I really am not sure about how to proceed for this big disk problem.

Any ideas/links will really help.

Thank you.

Regards,
A.S
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My understanding is that grub and lilo are not able to boot off of GPT 
labeled disks currently.  Given the size of currently available disks, 
this will probably change soon, however, for now you need a small 
partition to boot a large disk.




sorry, a bit quick off the trigger, but essentially, if you wanted to 
use a single RAID-5 volume of this size (even if you configured it as 
you said) the GPT label for the volume would be what gets you cuz of the 
boot loader.


The use of LVM and XFS, just have to do with the way they handle larger 
disks.  With LVM you can lay out the disks in a bit more fine tuned 
manner that allows you go get around some limitations in certain file 
systems.  XFS is just recommended because it is a very good performer 
and was meant to handle large file systems from its inception.  Feel 
free to use JFS, ReiserFS or your local don-juan-ho file system you like




I think its finally got into my head now. :)

From what i understand (after your replies and some more googling)
GRUB cannot boot from gpt labeled drives.
So no matter how i partition them, it just wont boot.

So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)

Yes, i lose if the 300G fails, but i think i can do something about that 
later.


Thanks for the replies.

Regards,
A.S
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Johnny Hughes
Anup Shukla wrote:
 James A. Peltier wrote:
 James A. Peltier wrote:
 Anup Shukla wrote:
 Hi All,

 Sorry if this has been answered many times.
 But i have been going through a lot of pages (via google search).
 The more i search, the more its confusing me.

 I have a server with 6 (750G each) SATA disks with H/W Raid 5.

 I plan to allocate the space as follows

 swap 8G
 /boot 100M
 / 20G
 -- and remaining space to /data{1,2,3,N} (equal sizes)

 However after the installation and reboot, i got an error about bad
 partition for /data8

 I had hit the 2T limit.

 Then i found this page at
 http://www.knowplace.org/pages/howtos/linux_large_filesystems_support.php


 which speaks of using Parted/LVM2 and XFS.

 If i understand this correctly,
 I need to have 1 disk to host the CentOS installation.
 And i can use the other 5 disks in a RAID array
 (label type gpt...)

 Is it not possible to partition and use the existing RAID 5 volume?

 I really am not sure about how to proceed for this big disk problem.

 Any ideas/links will really help.

 Thank you.

 Regards,
 A.S
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 My understanding is that grub and lilo are not able to boot off of
 GPT labeled disks currently.  Given the size of currently available
 disks, this will probably change soon, however, for now you need a
 small partition to boot a large disk.


 sorry, a bit quick off the trigger, but essentially, if you wanted to
 use a single RAID-5 volume of this size (even if you configured it as
 you said) the GPT label for the volume would be what gets you cuz of
 the boot loader.

 The use of LVM and XFS, just have to do with the way they handle
 larger disks.  With LVM you can lay out the disks in a bit more fine
 tuned manner that allows you go get around some limitations in certain
 file systems.  XFS is just recommended because it is a very good
 performer and was meant to handle large file systems from its
 inception.  Feel free to use JFS, ReiserFS or your local don-juan-ho
 file system you like

 
 I think its finally got into my head now. :)
 
 From what i understand (after your replies and some more googling)
 GRUB cannot boot from gpt labeled drives.
 So no matter how i partition them, it just wont boot.
 
 So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
 Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)
 
 Yes, i lose if the 300G fails, but i think i can do something about that
 later.
 
 Thanks for the replies.

I know that XFS gets all the press about being a great performing file
system ... but if you want the best stability on CentOS, you should at
least consider ext3 instead.

I have worked very hard to get stable code for xfs in centos-4 and
centos-5, and lots of people use it, but (IMHO) ext3 is still much more
stable with the CentOS Kernels.

That is my $0.02 ... I'm sure other people will tell you I am all hosed
up :D

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes



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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Peter Kjellstrom
On Tuesday 23 October 2007, Anup Shukla wrote:
...
 I think its finally got into my head now. :)

  From what i understand (after your replies and some more googling)
 GRUB cannot boot from gpt labeled drives.
 So no matter how i partition them, it just wont boot.

Correct.

 So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
 Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)

That will work. Another way is to see if the raid-controller can present two 
volumes from your raid5, one small (for OS) and one big (for gpt large fs). 
If this works then you'll get one device on which you can use msdos 
partitions and boot from and one (2T) on which you use gpt (or simply lvm 
directly on the device).

/Peter


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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread James A. Peltier

Johnny Hughes wrote:

I know that XFS gets all the press about being a great performing file
system ... but if you want the best stability on CentOS, you should at
least consider ext3 instead.

I have worked very hard to get stable code for xfs in centos-4 and
centos-5, and lots of people use it, but (IMHO) ext3 is still much more
stable with the CentOS Kernels.

That is my $0.02 ... I'm sure other people will tell you I am all hosed
up :D

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes


EXT3 performance is lacking in many areas and its support for larger 
file systems is still a problem.  However, it is rock solid and 
hopefully EXT4 will address the performance and file system limit issues.


--
James A. Peltier
Technical Director, RHCE
SCIRF | GrUVi @ Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-3610
Fax : 778-782-3045
Mobile  : 778-840-6434
E-Mail  : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website : http://gruvi.cs.sfu.ca | http://scirf.cs.sfu.ca
MSN : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Anup Shukla

Peter Kjellstrom wrote:

On Tuesday 23 October 2007, Anup Shukla wrote:
...

I think its finally got into my head now. :)

 From what i understand (after your replies and some more googling)
GRUB cannot boot from gpt labeled drives.
So no matter how i partition them, it just wont boot.


Correct.


So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)


Yes, thought about it.
But DELL PERC does not seem to be able to do that.
That is atleast what i have found out till now.
Wish it was possible.

Just in case, if anyone knows better, please let me know.
I have a Dell PE2950



That will work. Another way is to see if the raid-controller can present two 
volumes from your raid5, one small (for OS) and one big (for gpt large fs). 
If this works then you'll get one device on which you can use msdos 
partitions and boot from and one (2T) on which you use gpt (or simply lvm 
directly on the device).


/Peter




Regards,
A.S
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Anup Shukla

Sorry, the previous mail i sent was not correctly quoted.
Corrections below.

Anup Shukla wrote:

Peter Kjellstrom wrote:

On Tuesday 23 October 2007, Anup Shukla wrote:
...

I think its finally got into my head now. :)

 From what i understand (after your replies and some more googling)
GRUB cannot boot from gpt labeled drives.
So no matter how i partition them, it just wont boot.


Correct.


So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)


That will work. Another way is to see if the raid-controller can 
present two volumes from your raid5, one small (for OS) and one big 
(for gpt large fs). If this works then you'll get one device on which 
you can use msdos partitions and boot from and one (2T) on which you 
use gpt (or simply lvm directly on the device).


/Peter




Yes, thought about it.
But DELL PERC does not seem to be able to do that.
That is atleast what i have found out till now.
Wish it was possible.

Just in case, if anyone knows better, please let me know.
I have a Dell PE2950

Regards,
A.S

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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Johnny Hughes
James A. Peltier wrote:
 Johnny Hughes wrote:
 I know that XFS gets all the press about being a great performing file
 system ... but if you want the best stability on CentOS, you should at
 least consider ext3 instead.

 I have worked very hard to get stable code for xfs in centos-4 and
 centos-5, and lots of people use it, but (IMHO) ext3 is still much more
 stable with the CentOS Kernels.

 That is my $0.02 ... I'm sure other people will tell you I am all hosed
 up :D

 EXT3 performance is lacking in many areas and its support for larger
 file systems is still a problem.  However, it is rock solid and
 hopefully EXT4 will address the performance and file system limit issues.
 

I don't disagree with that assessment, however newer versions of ext3
have switches to use to improve performance and they work on bigger file
systems.

Still, ext3 support is indeed lacking on larger filesystems and yes,
hopefully ext4 will address this.

But ... still, if spending a fortune on HUGE drives for an enterprise
file system I would still think that one should at least see if ext3
will meet their needs before automatically shifting to XFS.  I have seen
many a filesystem be unrecoverable with XFS, especially on 4K stack
systems (which CentOS i386 is).

Believe me, I have personally put a lot of time and effort into the xfs
filesystem modules that are in CentOS Plus and CentOS Extras ... and I
use them in some places, but I just want to be on record saying that
ext3 is more stable and I recommend its use unless it just
_WILL_NOT_WORK_, that's all :D

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes



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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Morten Torstensen

Anup Shukla wrote:

So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)


If you use a hardware RAID adapter, you can make two LUNs from the 
disks. So make one big RAID5 array but two logical drives. I would still 
use LVM anyway for management down the road.


Not all hardware RAID adapters might support this, but if yours does you 
will get data protection for free on your system drive.


//Morten



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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Anup Shukla

Johnny Hughes wrote:

James A. Peltier wrote:

Johnny Hughes wrote:

I know that XFS gets all the press about being a great performing file
system ... but if you want the best stability on CentOS, you should at
least consider ext3 instead.

I have worked very hard to get stable code for xfs in centos-4 and
centos-5, and lots of people use it, but (IMHO) ext3 is still much more
stable with the CentOS Kernels.

That is my $0.02 ... I'm sure other people will tell you I am all hosed
up :D


EXT3 performance is lacking in many areas and its support for larger
file systems is still a problem.  However, it is rock solid and
hopefully EXT4 will address the performance and file system limit issues.



I don't disagree with that assessment, however newer versions of ext3
have switches to use to improve performance and they work on bigger file
systems.

Still, ext3 support is indeed lacking on larger filesystems and yes,
hopefully ext4 will address this.

But ... still, if spending a fortune on HUGE drives for an enterprise
file system I would still think that one should at least see if ext3
will meet their needs before automatically shifting to XFS.  I have seen
many a filesystem be unrecoverable with XFS, especially on 4K stack
systems (which CentOS i386 is).

Believe me, I have personally put a lot of time and effort into the xfs
filesystem modules that are in CentOS Plus and CentOS Extras ... and I
use them in some places, but I just want to be on record saying that
ext3 is more stable and I recommend its use unless it just
_WILL_NOT_WORK_, that's all :D

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes




I am not an expert in filesystems.
But, yes, in all these years on Linux, i have never found ext3 go bad 
for me ever.


Infact, i have never tried any other fs till date.

Going by the comments and views of everyone, i would prefer to go with ext3.

The drive is a large one, but i have no particular need to make one big 
partition on it.


I can as well have several small partitions  (in fact thats what i want) 
with each partition being the data store for 1 mogstored daemon.


Now i am not sure if thats the best possible solution, but i still got 
time to implement it and do my benchmarks.


For now, ext3 is surely the fs of choice. Cannot afford to lose anything 
thats going to be stored on this server.


A big thanks to everyone.

Regards,
A.S

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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Anup Shukla

Morten Torstensen wrote:

Anup Shukla wrote:

So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)


If you use a hardware RAID adapter, you can make two LUNs from the 
disks. So make one big RAID5 array but two logical drives. I would still 
use LVM anyway for management down the road.


Not all hardware RAID adapters might support this, but if yours does you 
will get data protection for free on your system drive.


//Morten



Thats making me feel miserable .. ;)

I had this thought, and then a message on the list said the same and now 
one more message saying the same.


I am literally scavenging through Dell PERC guides to find out if and 
how this can be done.


Hope this is possible with Dell PERC.

Regards,
A.S
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Christopher Chan



I know that XFS gets all the press about being a great performing file
system ... but if you want the best stability on CentOS, you should at
least consider ext3 instead.


+1



I have worked very hard to get stable code for xfs in centos-4 and
centos-5, and lots of people use it, but (IMHO) ext3 is still much more
stable with the CentOS Kernels.

That is my $0.02 ... I'm sure other people will tell you I am all hosed
up :D


I will be telling them wait for a power loss, wait for the XFS code to 
shut down one of its filesystem for no reason, take a good look at the 
neverending stream of bug fixes in the mainline kernel, take a look at 
those kernel developers who have openly announced they want nothing to 
do with the XFS codebase and to note the fact that the XFS code is the 
largest there is for a filesystem due to all the workarounds they have 
had to put into to deal with Linux's different vm and other stuff.


There is a reason why XFS is not that stable but it sure is the fastest 
there is for writes.

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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Shawn Everett
 I will be telling them wait for a power loss, wait for the XFS code to
 shut down one of its filesystem for no reason, take a good look at the
 neverending stream of bug fixes in the mainline kernel, take a look at
 those kernel developers who have openly announced they want nothing to
 do with the XFS codebase and to note the fact that the XFS code is the
 largest there is for a filesystem due to all the workarounds they have
 had to put into to deal with Linux's different vm and other stuff.


I have a couple mission critical servers (3TB) that I formatted with JFS.  
I have been completely happy with the results and have yet to see any 
filesystem corruption.

A JFS Fsck on the drive takes only a few seconds even after a crash.

I have created and moved various large files without a problem.  I have 
also pulled the plug during write intensive operations.

Just wanted to add another vote for JFS. :)

Shawn
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Christopher Chan

Shawn Everett wrote:

I will be telling them wait for a power loss, wait for the XFS code to
shut down one of its filesystem for no reason, take a good look at the
neverending stream of bug fixes in the mainline kernel, take a look at
those kernel developers who have openly announced they want nothing to
do with the XFS codebase and to note the fact that the XFS code is the
largest there is for a filesystem due to all the workarounds they have
had to put into to deal with Linux's different vm and other stuff.



I have a couple mission critical servers (3TB) that I formatted with JFS.  
I have been completely happy with the results and have yet to see any 
filesystem corruption.


Great! JFS takes second on all benchmarks. Writes, reads, ... you name 
it. The only question that I have had was was it stable but I had yet to 
hear about it being used.


http://untroubled.org/benchmarking/2004-04/

A bit old but I doubt things have changed much since then.



A JFS Fsck on the drive takes only a few seconds even after a crash.

I have created and moved various large files without a problem.  I have 
also pulled the plug during write intensive operations.


Just wanted to add another vote for JFS. :)



+1 :-D
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RE: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

2007-10-23 Thread Ross S. W. Walker
Anup Shukla wrote:
 
 Peter Kjellstrom wrote:
  On Tuesday 23 October 2007, Anup Shukla wrote:
  ...
  I think its finally got into my head now. :)
 
   From what i understand (after your replies and some more googling)
  GRUB cannot boot from gpt labeled drives.
  So no matter how i partition them, it just wont boot.
  
  Correct.
  
  So finally, i am putting a 300G SATA to act as the system drive.
  Then use the other 750G's to be the big RAID 5 Volume (XFS)
 
 Yes, thought about it.
 But DELL PERC does not seem to be able to do that.
 That is atleast what i have found out till now.
 Wish it was possible.
 
 Just in case, if anyone knows better, please let me know.
 I have a Dell PE2950

Which Dell PERC they make dozens under that name?

If it is the PERC 5e then yes you can create multiple LUNs out of an
array.

  
  That will work. Another way is to see if the 
 raid-controller can present two 
  volumes from your raid5, one small (for OS) and one big 
 (for gpt large fs). 
  If this works then you'll get one device on which you can use msdos 
  partitions and boot from and one (2T) on which you use gpt 
 (or simply lvm 
  directly on the device).

IMHO I would recommend using 2 internal drives with a software mirror
for the CentOS install and keep your external array completely out of
the OS install.

I use LVM for all volumes, use ext3 file system for the OS volumes, and
you can pick or choose the file system you want to use for your data
volumes, I'd probably stick with ext3 or maybe jfs if it wasn't too
cumbersome to get going.

My server disk config of choice in kickstart speak:

part raid.1 --noformat --onpart sda1
part raid.2 --noformat --onpart sdb1
part raid.3 --noformat --onpart sda2
part raid.4 --noformat --onpart sdb2

raid /boot --useexisting --fstype ext3 --level=RAID1 --device=md0 raid.1 raid.2
raid pv.1 --noformat --useexisting --fstype physical volume (LVM) 
--level=RAID1 --device=md1 raid.3 raid.4

volgroup CentOS --noformat --useexisting --pesize=32768 pv.1
logvol / --useexisting --fstype ext3 --name=root --vgname=CentOS --size=8192
logvol swap --useexisting --fstype swap --name=swap --vgname=CentOS --size=4096

That setup will yield an initial 100MB /boot, 8GB / and 4GB swap and leave the
rest of the space free for future use.

You can then create a separate VG out of your data array and sub-divide it into
smaller LVs formatted for the FS of choice.

Don't allocate all storage initially, just what you need to get started you can
always extend your volumes later relatively easily, but shrinking is far more
troublesome.

-Ross

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Re: [CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks [SOLVED]

2007-10-23 Thread Christopher Chan



So, i have been quite moronic in not trying to apply logic initially.


Please leave that term for those who really deserve it. As for not 
trying perhaps the lazy label is more suitable :-P

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