[ale] Needing to cut up server disk space

[DJ-Pfulio]

HW-RAID if you need performance.
SW-RAID if you want flexibility and can live with less performance.
Too bad you don't have 6 drives - then ZFS would be easy choice.

My only concern with BTRFS now is published issues for really, really,
really, bad performance when used on a KVM host.

What's wrong with SW-RAID and LVM?  It is very flexible.  Heck, if you
run gentoo, it is a cakewalk in comparison.

But if you **need** performance, it is hard to argue against HW-RAID.

On 09/24/2015 12:43 AM, Beddingfield, Allen wrote:
> 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 
> ________________________________ 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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