Re: Boot / LVM best practices
On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 3:19 AM, M.Lewis <cajun@cajuninc.com> wrote:
>
> I have a machine running Lenny with a 250GB IDE HD in it. The HD is on its
> last legs giving S.M.A.R.T. errors.
>
> I have a question about how best to divide things up in the new setup. The
> current 250GB IDE HD has two partitions on it:
>
> /dev/hda1 = linux (~80 MB)
> /dev/hda2 = linux LVM (~249.92 GB)
>
> I'm thinking to replace this IDE drive with two SATA HDs. One as small as I
> can get. Say 100GB or so and make that the boot drive. And a second HD say
> 500GB or so and moving the LVM over to that.
>
> Would it be better to move the LVM to a larger SATA drive and migrate the
> boot drive on to a new small IDE HD? I've even thought to set it up to boot
> from a flash drive. Not sure that would be wise either.
Given the current size of HDs, dedicating a full one to /boot is a
waste since 250MB will be amply sufficient.
You should use either one HD to replicate your current system on a
larger disk or two and set up mdadm to use RAID 1 array.
At work, someone (probably a project manager who convinced the
powers-that-be that we were "misallocating san resources") convinced
management that we shouldn't slice up our Solaris boxes with the usual
/, swap, /var, /usr, /opt, and /export/home. This decision carried
over to our RHEL servers and I have followed suit in my private and
moonlighting habits and I split up my disks into / and /home (and
/boot if using mdadm and/or lvm). We have 1,000s of servers and get
the occasional "root is over 90%" alert but it has been a mostly
painless change.
If you really want separate partitions for /usr and /var, check your
current usage with "du -sh /usr; du -sh /var" and use those values
plus a decent margin to set up a new layout.
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