Thanks for your opinion. For now I will stick with the large RAID volume and no
slices/partitions. As you said, it makes life less complicated. I think there
is no problem about future upgrades supporting large volumes. I guess there
will be support for even larger volumes. The more important concern for me is
what to do if the capacity needs will rise from a few TB to a few dozen or a
few hundreds of TB. I gues there is only one economical solution for my
project. Lustre cluster file system.
Vinum... As I found a much simpler solution, I think there is no need for
implementing it. My personal opinion is that there is no excuse for using
software raid solutions on a production server systems (except RAID1 where
money is realy tight). Most HW RAID controllers are well supported on Linux and
xBSD and the advantages of hot swapable drives, battery powered write cache and
high performance XOR IOPs are very important for 24*7 systems. This does not
mean that I don't want to mess with vinum. I will when there will bee enough
time for it.
Regards,
Joze
Bill Moran wrote:
In response to Joze Volf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I have a HP DL320s 2U server with 12 500 GB SATA drives and Smart Array P400
RAID controller. The machine will be a video streaming server for a public
library. The system I am installing is 7.0-RELEASE, amd64.
I made 2 RAID6 volumes, one 120GB for the system and one 4.3TB for the
streaming media content. The first problem I have encountered is that during
installation, the large RAID volume wasn't visible. No problem, because I could
install the system to the small 120G volume.
After the base system installation I decided to delete the large volume using
the HP ACU and create a few smaller 1TB volumes, which will hopefully be
recognized by the kernel. They were, buth when I ran the fdisk from sysinstall
it always reported:
WARNING: A geometry of xxxxxxx/255/32 for da1 is incorrect. Using a more
likely geometry. If this geometry is incorrect...
That always happens. I don't remember the last time I saw a disk where it
_didn't_ complain about that. Don't know the details of what's going on
there, but I've never seen it cause a problem.
I was trying to do a few 1TB vinum partitions and tying them together into
single concatenated volume (I already did something similar in linux using LVM
and it worked great). I had no success.
Well, can't help you much if you don't describe what you tried to do here.
Then I searched the web and found this patch
http://yogurt.org/FreeBSD/ciss_large.diff and hoped it will resolve the geometry
problem. It did not, but one other thing it should do is allow kernel to get da
device for an array > 2TB. It did!
What version of FreeBSD is this? It looks like this driver has seen
significant redesign in 7-STABLE.
I deleted the smaller 1TB volumes and recreated one large 4.3TB RAID volume.
The kernel recognized it perfectly as /dev/da1. Great! Then I tried to create a
slice using sysintall fdisk and a filesystem using sysinstall label. Nothing
but trouble!
Again, without any details, not much anyone can do to help.
I searched the web again and found a possible solution to my problem. I used the "newfs -U -O2
/dev/da1" command to create the filesystem directly on the RAID volume. It worked without a
problem. Then I mounted /dev/da1 to /var/media and here is the output of "df -h" command:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a 4.3G 377M 3.6G 9% /
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
/dev/da0s1e 7.7G 12K 7.1G 0% /tmp
/dev/da0s1f 36G 1.6G 31G 5% /usr
/dev/da0s1d 58G 25M 53G 0% /var
/dev/da1 4.3T 4.0K 4.0T 0% /var/media
Is it somehow bad to make a filesystem directly on a storage device such as
disk drive or hardware raid volume?
Yes and no. If you use certain type of disk utilities, such as bootable
CDs that check disk health and what not, they may get confused by the fact
that there is no DOS-style fdisk partition on the disk.
Otherwise, it works fine. I frequently do this to make my life simpler
(why install partitions when you don't need them?) It also wastes less
disk space (although, who cares about a few hundred bytes on a 4T disk).
Now that you've got it up and running, I'd be more concerned about making
sure your next FreeBSD upgrade will continue to support that sized disk.
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