Big Drive Partition Schema?

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Posted by Vinayak_Sharma, 12-14-2009, 10:38 AM
What's your preference when partitioning a big drive like 500GB or 1 TB drive. Specifically for the purpose of selling shared hosting using CentOS & cPanel. Simple or advanced What I think simple is good as we get flexibility, like /var or /usr are not restricted, whereas advanced one gives better speed (I read somewhere). So what you guys think, does having smaller partition gives any advantage of read/write disk IO etc. Or simple partition is better. Or is LVM a better option, so that we can re-size the partitions with ease as and when required using fsadm or if something else is there.
Posted by bryonhost1, 12-14-2009, 10:54 AM
Hi! My new approach is a bit different. I now have primary drives that are smaller but faster. I'm currently waiting on servers with 10K Raptor SATA primary drives and SAS drives. I still can't imagine having a 1TB drive without at least three partitions. In fact..I just requested: /one 200GB /two 300GB /three 500GB
Posted by Vinayak_Sharma, 12-14-2009, 12:06 PM
Care to explain a bit more on what you are saying? I have two concerns actually, hoe to handle the situation when a partition get filled up and get best performance out of the hardware we chose. There are methods to increase the conventional partition size, but they are cumbersome and not very reliable. So what make more sense, to use simple partition to do away with filled up partitions, or to use advanced partition to get better performance (if it really does). Or to use logical volume. Ultimately what is the best method to have both flexibility and performance.
Posted by Steven, 12-14-2009, 12:56 PM
I utilize /boot = 150 /tmp = 2gb swap = 2048+ / = rest
Posted by UNIXy, 12-14-2009, 06:12 PM
dev/sda1 /boot ext3 200MB /dev/sda2 LVM -> PV -> VG rest of disk space Then create LVs of 8GB for / 1GB for /tmp, 5GB for /home, 2GB for /var, 2xRAM+1GB for swap. An fsck on 300GB+ partition will cause extended down time. That's why it's always good to allocate the minimum amount of disk for each partition and as it grows simply, lvresize -L+XG /dev/vg/xpartition and resize2fs. All done online with no downtime but only very minor "slowdown." This partitioning scheme can be done at install time Regards Joe
Posted by hostultimo, 12-14-2009, 06:47 PM
hmmm... I wanted to purchase a 1TB in the near future and partition it into 3 parts one part to host a (1)reseller within a VPS structure to run a couple of sites...[RAM 1824 MB] [Disk Space 300 GB] [Bandwidth 1425 GB]... (2) another vps to hold resellers [RAM 3GB ] [Disk Space 500 GB][Bandwidth 1500 GB] and (3)another vps to hold shared [RAM 3 GB] [Disk Space 200 GB] [Bandwidth 3075 GB] Is this a bad setup?
Posted by Vinayak_Sharma, 12-14-2009, 11:03 PM
Thanks Steven, Thanks Joe for sparing your precious time to answer my queries. @ Steven, having big partition won't cause some slow reading/writing, also I think there is also a limit on number of directories/files in a partition/folder? @ Joe, you raised a good point about fsck time on big partition. So is LV fully compatible with cPanel? and are you sure using LV resize/re-partition can be done as and when required once server is in production? Thanks again.
Posted by RyanD, 12-15-2009, 12:04 AM
Well, FSCKing problems are really only an ext3 issue, if you used a different filesystem for /home or your largest partitions such as XFS that would be a non-issue.
Posted by net, 12-15-2009, 12:19 AM
Moved > Hosting Security and Technology.
Posted by Vinayak_Sharma, 12-15-2009, 12:24 AM
And does cPanel supports XFS or file systems other than ext3? The point I want to arrive at is, how to partition big drives system and what filesystem/technology to use for performance and flexibility while keeping cPanel trouble free for the purpose of selling shared hosting.
Posted by Vinayak_Sharma, 12-15-2009, 12:26 AM
Thanks net.