How to partition your disk?

Linux and Unix-Like Red Hat
1

Hello,

I am a new member of the forum.

I need an idea on how to partition the disk.

My situation is as follows:

I have two 3TB disks ognuno.In 6TB total then, but I have to do to force a RAID 1 so my space will be 3TB. I'll have to force install RedHat 5.8 and liquids is to be taken in considering that the GPT is not supportato.Sulla machine will have to work just a single heavy application whose purpose is to collect and store the data in a DB2. The server machine has sufficient processing resources to allow the application to work well. My request for help is how do I partition the disk for this scenario? Whereas GPT is not supported I'm forced to create a boot partition less than 2TB. My idea is to create a partition of 500GB with 64GB of swap (this is a specific request of the application that asks me over 32GB of RAM should I expect 1GB of swap for each of RAM), the remaining 2.5 TB them memorizzari use DB2 for the data in the database.

And as a good idea? As you would do?

2

First off: whatever your translation engine is, please switch to another one. I have a hard time second-guessing what you might mean.

Before you begin: PLAN, PLAN, PLAN, then plan again. Write down which application you are going to install, how much space you need for the binaries, how much for the data itself, etc..

Always keep in mind that it is easy to increase the size of a filesystem but hard to make it smaller. Therefore, start out with as little space as possible and increase this to the size necessary.

What you need:

  1. Boot partition Linux cannot boot from a logical volume, so you need a boot partition to boot from. It should be formatted as "ext3" filesystem and can be very small: 512MB is absolutely enough.

  2. The rest of the disk goes to one volume group. If i am correct the RedHat installation process will guide you through the creation of the volume group, so just follow the dialog.

  3. Within the volume group all the other filesystems will be created as logical volumes. You will need:

3A. a swap area: make it the same size as your installed memory. More is not better, just a waste.

3B. a "/" filesystem (ext3 or ext4) for the system itself. 5GB are more than enough, you can make it bigger later if this is necessary.

3C. a "/tmp" filesystem (ext3 or ext4) for temporary files. Start with 1GB and increase as necessary.

3D. a "/opt" filesystem (ext3 or ext4) for the application (binaries). Start with what you have found out the application needs, NOT MORE. Increase if it is too small, but only then.

3E. You mentioned DB2, so you probably need some space for the database itself. Talk to the application people where to mount they want it mounted and how much space you have to provide for this. I suggest you leave that out during installation and create it later, as you don't need it to install the system.

3F. It might be a good idea to have a small filesystem for "/home", so that users can put some scripts in their home directories without taxing the "/" filesystem. You might also consider "/root" to be its own filesystem, because you might need some space for logs, administrative scripts, etc.. Start with 5GB in both cases and increase as necessary.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

3

I vote for not having a /opt partition because binaries are in /usr and /opt.
But that means you must have a much bigger / partition, I suggest 40 GB

But I vote for either a 25 GB /var or a 20 GB /var/tmp partition (BTW the same size for /tmp),
it contains variable data and should not fill up /.
What speaks for /var/tmp (if not sym-linked to /tmp):
syslog and monitoring tools like HP-OVO need to log a disk full condition in /var. Again this means a +5 GB for the / partition.

4

According to the Filesystem hierarchy standard /opt is for "Add-on application software packages" - like DB/2 as the thread-O/P has mentioned. "/usr", on the other hand ("usr"="Unix Software Resources")

So, if one thinks about installing application binaries in "/opt" it might be a good idea to have it reside in its own filesystem. If you are foing to cluster the system you even have to, so that it can be made part of the resource group and shared between the nodes.

Regarding the size of "/var/tmp" and "/tmp": my tenet is to start out small and increase as necessary. It is only 2 commands to increase from 1GB to 20GB should the necessity arise. It is a lot more complicated to shrink it back once the space is allocated.

It is true that disk space is cheap nowadays and, agreed, i might be a little old-fashioned, coming from times where 1k was a lot of space. Still, i hate to waste anything, be it diskspace, processor power, memory or whatever.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

5

I agree with you.

The software I'm talking about is IBM Tivoli Network Manager / Netcool Omnibus.

DB2 I need to store the data collected from ITNM/Omnibus.

For the disk partition I agree with your idea, in principle.

Just thought I'd create /home with a lot of disk space and mounted on a dedicated partition. This idea came to me, because DB2 creates three user during installation. An administrator, an instance owner and fenced user. So if instace owner creates the DB I'm talking about, DB2 allocates in /home/instance_owner_user data from the DB.

Another solution would be to create a partition only data, and be able to tell DB2 to write on that partition the data in the DB, but I do not know if you can do.