What is the best way to approach this problem?

edwardzc · 12-25-2010, 02:55 PM

Situation:

2x750gb hard drives on a server

Need:

I want to combine these two hard drives so that I can partition the 1.5 tb total for OpenVZ. I intend to split up the 1.5 tb for other users but the main reason I leased a server with two hard drives is because I did not want decreased performance from multiple users accessing the drive. (Thus the workload is split between 2 drives)

Now, I have already contemplated using software raid(raid0) to stripe it. Although, if I raid it after partitioning drive one, will the partition stick?

Is there a way to use both hard drives separate? -> 3 users on hard drive1, 3 users on hard drive 2 -> both hard drives use the system resources(ram/cpu) ->Have to install openvz on both disks?

tekhead2 · 12-25-2010, 05:25 PM

From my experience if you setup any RAID it will wipe the drive during the setup process. There maybe some magical way to create software raid using an existing partition, but it will have to to be done by hand , I've only used wizards to create RAID arrays. If your wanting to utilize both the disks I would make one disk the OS drive and the second the OpenVZ container drive and set the mount points accordingly. So drive 1 would be the OS and filesystem, and Drive 2 would be the OpenVZ containers and users files. If your leasing this server is it a full physical server or just a VPS? If your leasing it the hosting company maybe able to provide you with a hardware RAID solution. I always prefer hardware RAIDs over software ones as the software RAIDs will require more CPU to stripe the disks .

I suggest using XFS files system if your going to be working with really large disks as most of the benchmarks I've read say it has better performance. I'd also suggest you try Proxmox as I've had great success with it.

http://www.proxmox.com/products/proxmox-ve

edwardzc · 12-25-2010, 11:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tekhead2

From my experience if you setup any RAID it will wipe the drive during the setup process. There maybe some magical way to create software raid using an existing partition, but it will have to to be done by hand , I've only used wizards to create RAID arrays. If your wanting to utilize both the disks I would make one disk the OS drive and the second the OpenVZ container drive and set the mount points accordingly. So drive 1 would be the OS and filesystem, and Drive 2 would be the OpenVZ containers and users files. If your leasing this server is it a full physical server or just a VPS? If your leasing it the hosting company maybe able to provide you with a hardware RAID solution. I always prefer hardware RAIDs over software ones as the software RAIDs will require more CPU to stripe the disks .

I suggest using XFS files system if your going to be working with really large disks as most of the benchmarks I've read say it has better performance. I'd also suggest you try Proxmox as I've had great success with it.

http://www.proxmox.com/products/proxmox-ve

The reason I want to raid0 it is because I want to fully utilize all that space for the users. If I do this right, 90-95% of the space will for the users whereas the other 5-10% can be for OS files/swap/OpenVZ install. This is a full physical server and would a hardware raid controller make all the difference? I can spare the CPU cycles.

How can I implement the XFS file system?

Proxmox, I've tried it, I have alot of issues with it. Would you be able to answer a few questions on Proxmox?