Rajesh Saxena wrote:
Hello all. I am installing SUSE Professional 9 on computer with two 80 IDE hard drives. During custom partitioning I get a little lost. Here is my setup:
I set aside 2G for 1st partition on drive 1. No format, only RAID I set aside 2G for 1st partition on drive 2. No format, only RAID I choose RAID option. Create RAID1 mirror array. Format filesystem as XFS and use / for mount point
Consider the following space requirements for a full suse 9.0 install (these are from memory and rounded up): /opt 4GB / 500MB /usr 9GB /boot 50MB /var 1GB (smaller at first but it grows quickly) I think it'd be a good idea to make a non-RAID /boot partition. It'll work on R1 but I'm not sure it's encouraged.
I set aside 2G for 2nd partition on drive 1. No format, only RAID I set asise 2G for 2nd partition on drive 2. No format, only RAId I choose RAID option. Create RAID1 mirror array. Format filesystem as Swap.
I didn't know you could put swap on RAID...but if you can, 2G is pretty large. How much memory do you have?
I use the rest of space on drive 1 for one big RAID section I use the rest of space on drive 2 for one big RAID section I choose RAID option, Create RAID1 mirror array. Now here is my question: I do not format as any filesystem and don't assign a mount point. I select OK. Then I choose LVM and create one big LVM over the big RAID array and create smaller volumes for /var /home and /usr inside as XFS filesystems. Is this OK or am I doing it wrong?
This sounds correct. LVM wants only a physical device to form it's physical volume (PV). RAID provides that with your /mdX
Should I be assigning mount point for last RAID array before LVM?
No. Consider also your upgrade path. If you do not want to overwrite your current system before first trying out a new version (suse 9.1 for example) you should create an additional partition (non-LVM) for a new system to be installed to. I am regretting not having done this on several of my boxes b/c I've heard sometimes the upgrade destroys config files, etc. It'd be easiest to just have two large (5-10GB depending on how loaded you like your system) partitions for system installs then the rest of the space for data, swap, and boot, all of which can be shared by any running linux distro. Toggle between them for seamless upgrades (until they become too small for the new distros in the future) BR