[ale] Needing to cut up server disk space

[Beddingfield, Allen]

First of all, I would DEFINITELY do the hardware RAID.  I have exactly the reverse feeling - one of the reasons I hesitate on using FreeNAS is that they want to handle the RAID.  To ease your fears, I am the primary Linux System Engineer at The University of Alabama - I also work a lot with the central virtualization environment (the the tune of 800+ virtual machines).  We are using Dell hardware, and PERC on all systems.  We have no server systems without hardware RAID.  They function beautifully.  I would suggest a RAID 5, with a big btrfs "/".  You can handle everything you need to do with subvolumes.

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama
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From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Jeff Hubbs [jhubbslist at att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2015 10:42 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: [ale] Needing to cut up server disk space

I am about to get "regifted" a Dell server at work which I am told will have five 400GB SAS drives. I plan to turn this into a Gentoo Linux server into which lab staff will shell to do whatever, and I expect I may have a PostgreSQL instance running there as well.

I'd like some suggestions as to the most admin-friendly way to deal with the five drives given that:

  *   I really dislike hardware RAID cards like Dell PERC. If there has to be one, I would much rather set it to JBOD mode and get my RAIDing done some other way.
  *   I foresee I will have gnashing of teeth if I set in stone at install time the sizes of the /var and /home volumes. There's no telling how much or how little space PostgreSQL might need in the future and you know how GRAs are - give them disk space and they'll take disk space. :)

I can go kernel raid, I can go LVM if I have to, I can go btrfs if I want to - or, you can talk me out of my PERC hate. I know that at 5x400GB I could RAID5 that stack easily in hardware and then use LVM or btrfs from there, but I wanted to see if anyone had a suggestion as to how to proceed starting from JBOD that would be about as easy to live with.
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