Good morning :)
Dermot Paikkos wrote:
Well, for starters there are a bunch of different RAID options available. I'd go with RAID 5 if the controller supports it. To Linux it'll just appear as one physical disk anyway, i.e. you do not necessarily need to worry about any RAID config issues in Linux itself.Hi admins,
I'm about to buy a custom build server and wanted to know to configure the RAID. This will be the first time I have configured a RAID from scratch and I am a little un-sure about how the layout of the system.
The server will primarily be used as a file server, uses a 3Ware SATA 8 port card and will serve about 50 users. There will initially be 4-
5 disks installed. I would like one as a hot-spare but it isn't written in stone at this time.
A hot-spare is nice to have, but IMO not immediately useful. I tend to keep a brand new (tested OK) disk on hand, but not plugged in. It all depends on how closely the system is monitored. In my experience it's rare that two disks fail immediately, and RAID 5 can work with one failed disk just fine for a limited time.
My own thoughts were to keep the root file system outside of the RAID.Personally I wouldn't bother splitting one disk off the RAID array. You really don't gain anything, unless you have a good reason to run the disk in a non-RAID environment - i.e. if you preconfig the disk in another machine and then move it to the server or something.
This would allow me to do a complete OS re-install without effecting the RAID. There are a couple of reasons why an OS re-install might be desirable: I may change my distro (currently slackware) and I may choose to try the i64 instead of i386 (AMD Opteron). This is just my thoughts and there may be some good reasons for not configuring the system in this way. If you have any please let me know.
What about swap? How should you configure the swap space on such a system. Can swap space be assigned to a RAIDed file system? Should it?Yep it most certainly can on hardware RAID. For performance reasons it should be on RAID too, IMO.
Is there anything else I should be thinking about or any documents should read (I tried tldp.org but nothing struck me). Any thoughts?The only thing you need to look for is the matching kernel module to boot from that controller. Other than that... nothing I can think of. I just slapped Slackware on an IBM e-Server with ServeRAID, and it worked perfectly on first try. I've simulated disk failures too... everything went rather smooth.
Thanx.
Dp.
J. - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
