[vox-tech] Large File Server - File System?

[Ted Deppner]

Use whatever LVM your distro supports.  This might seem like too much,
or overkill, or whatever, but it allows you to repartition easily, and
even migrate to another storage system... even while everything is
live.  I'm partial to ext3, having never, ever lost a ext2/3
partition, even when physical media started to fail (dd
conv=sync,noerror is your friend).  (With the understanding that I've
been using Linux since version 0.92 in the early 90's, and run on
everything from garage sale cheap ide drives to NetApp SANs, an run
several entire ISPs on nothing but linux for over a decade, I hope
it's obvious what a huge endorsement that is.)

I've used reiserfs with 4 T on a mail server... that worked well and
you can grow reiserfs volumes while they are online.

EXT2/3 support resizing (grow or shrink), but must be offline to do a
shrink. Not a big problem, IMHO.

XFS looks promising, but I know of no one who's used it extensively,
nor anything about it's robustness upon underlying disk failures or
resizing options.

Basic partition detail I'd use would be two disks, mirrored, for the
system itself (/, swap, everything needed to boot and run), and then a
separate LVM volume group for the rest of your physical disks.  This
allows you the flexibility to move the main LVM volume group to
another physical computer should the need arise, and/or replace system
disk(s) indepently.  You mount the main LVM partition wherever and
then symlink what you need onto it, or use a bind mount if you
prefer... or if you're doing something like samba shares, have samba
share directly from the LVM mount (sounds like what you want).  Keep
the system volume stuff separate from the "content" volume... sooner
or later you'll want to upgrade something and keeping things logically
(and to some extent physically) isolated will make that process much
easier.

Lastly, any arguments about file system "speed" variations is
irrelevant, IMHO.  You need file system features more than anything
else.  (Reiserfs, for instance is better for small files than ext2fs
is, hence it is good for a mail server with many many many small email
messages stored as individual files.)

I've you're new to LVMs... Logical Volume Manager.  disks (or PVs,
Phyical Volumes) are given to the LVM, and then aggregated as you
desire into Volume Groups (VGs).  A Volume group will then be used to
define one or more volumes.  The volumes can be thought of a
"partition", formattable with your favorite file system and directly
mounted anywhere you desire.  Volumes and Volume groups can be easily
grown or shrunk, and volume groups can be extended with more disks, or
a disk removed by migrating bits off one physical volume onto a new
one.  You can even move from one file system type to another by
shrinking and growing volumes.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Alex Mandel<tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:
> So I'm putting in a new file server at work.
> RAID 6, 8 TB
> It's purpose is to server large files(1GB+) and large amounts of files
> to local desktops and servers.(About 25 machines and several web services)
>
> 1. What partition scheme would people recommend?
> Yes I read the whole previous thread on this topic.
> Here's what I'm thinking:
> /   10 GB
> swap - do we even need swap?(we have 12 GB of ram)
> /var 10-20 GB
> /tmp    40 GB
> /home Everything else?
>
> 2. More importantly what file system should we use?
> ext3,ext4,XFS, etc?
>
> Note we'll probably run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS which may effect your answer.
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
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