Every time I install Ubuntu, I’m presented with partitioning disks and I’m rarely 100% certain when I choose partition sizes.
What’s a good practice in consideration of Webmin and Virtualmin if you have the following setup:
HP SmartArray
One External 5TB USB Drive
One External 8TB USB Drive
How would you configure the drives?
/home (websites and mail) and /var (databases) get big. Nothing else matters.
I usually just give / all the available space and don’t divide out /home and /var. File systems don’t need to be broken up for performance or backup purposes, anymore (and haven’t for decades). The only real clear reason to divide these days is if you need them to be on separate network storage volumes. Our servers have two disks in a mirrored configuration with a /boot partition (probably ~300-500MB these days), a swap partition (double memory or 8GB whichever is smaller), and the / partition/volume is the rest of the space. I don’t see any reason to make it complicated.
Edit: Actually, on our Cloudmin servers, we devote most of the space to a volume that Cloudmin can allocate VM roots from. So, that’s kinda different.
In my latest install, I mounted / on the RAID 1 (136GB) and /home on the RAID 0 (600somethingGB). Then, I added the USB drives and figure if there’s anything that needs to be offloaded, I could move the blocks or symlink to the space on the USB drives.
My LV’s are on a one-to-one basis with each physical disk.
I think I should be okay, but I did notice once that the /var folder was quite large on one of my installs.
I probably need to remedy the RAID 0 vulnerability by ensuring /home data is backed up regularly, and then fire up some sort of RAID 1 configuration instead. My older server only has space for 8 2.5" SAS drives and only goes up to 600GB support for each slot…so it may be worth it to just switch to a smaller form factor (currently Proliant DL380G7) and fire up some big storage.
I’d love to fire this thing up, but it’s just so big and bulky and heavy and … seems like overkill in today’s world.
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