I was just given a Dell R720xd with 160 GB memory and 12x 900 GB drives that I plan to deploy as my home mail/file/backup server to replace an aging Supermicro server running CentOS 7. Yeah, it's gross overkill for that and I expect to tuck most of the drives away for spares. How should I RAID and partition this beast for maximum reliability? My current C7 system is using 1 TB of 2 TB capacity on the root partition (4x 1 TB drives in RAID 10). /boot is 300MB/50GB. Memory and swap is 8GB each.
On 7/19/19 11:57 PM, Kenneth Porter wrote:> I was just given a Dell R720xd with 160 GB memory and 12x 900 GB drives that I plan to deploy as my home mail/file/backup server to replace an aging Supermicro server running CentOS 7. Yeah, it's gross overkill for that and I expect to tuck most of the > drives away for spares. > > How should I RAID and partition this beast for maximum reliability?If it can do JBOD, you may want to put FreeBSD on it and use ZFS. In any case, get two 147GB disks to install the system on and use some RAID mirror setup to create two logical volumes. That separates system from data and leaves you two spares for when a disk fails. You may want to take out some of the memory and check power consumption since more memory might consume more power, and you don't need that much. You probably want to avoid using the strange file system they invented for 8 because it seems to be a mess made from LVM and xfs, while its RAID capabilites weren't mentioned in the article I read about it. Like LVM sucks badly in that it is extremely inflexible: For example, try to make a snapshot to a different volume group when the one the volume you want to make a snapshot of is full ... Also, how do you limit the size of file systems with the new file system? The article said each file system can grow to the full size of the pool, and that is something I certainly wouldn't want because it could crash the server when one FS chokes another.> > My current C7 system is using 1 TB of 2 TB capacity on the root partition (4x 1 TB drives in RAID 10). /boot is 300MB/50GB. Memory and swap is 8GB each. > > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
--On Thursday, July 25, 2019 4:21 PM +0200 hw <hw at gc-24.de> wrote:> In any case, get two 147GB disks to install the system on and use some > RAID mirror setup to create two logical volumes. That separates system > from data and leaves you two spares for when a disk fails.I'm considering buying a couple 512GB SSDs to run in a mirror as the boot drive and use all the regular drives in hardware RAID 6 as /home (including IMAP email and Samba shares). I'm guessing I should put swap on the spindles?> You may want to take out some of the memory and check power consumption > since more memory might consume more power, and you don't need that much.Good idea. I'll probably cut it down to 32 GB, mostly for use by SpamAssassin and ClamAV.
On 7/19/19 11:57 PM, Kenneth Porter wrote:> I was just given a Dell R720xd with 160 GB memory and 12x 900 GB drives > that I plan to deploy as my home mail/file/backup server to replace an > aging Supermicro server running CentOS 7. Yeah, it's gross overkill for > that and I expect to tuck most of the drives away for spares. > > How should I RAID and partition this beast for maximum reliability? > > My current C7 system is using 1 TB of 2 TB capacity on the root > partition (4x 1 TB drives in RAID 10). /boot is 300MB/50GB. Memory and > swap is 8GB each.As I read it, 500MB boot will be enough. My CentOS 7 server (with GUI) without /home uses some 15GB (of 24GB root partition) so anything over 20GB should be enough for root partiton. 8GB SWAP should be enough since you will not hibernate it.> > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >-- Ljubomir Ljubojevic (Love is in the Air) PL Computers Serbia, Europe StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant