I searched and didn't see a thread that matched so here goes:

I am rebuilding a bunch of servers and want to do it right. They are Dell R200s and R300s with on-board LSI SAS1068E SCSI controllers with 2 SATA drives. The only RAID level supported on these cards is RAID 1. So, to the server, we have 148GB of space to deal with. They currently run 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10; I will be installing x64 Ubuntu 10.04.

I have always seen that it is best practice to partition in such a way that /boot, /var/log, /temp, and /home for example are separated out from /. Usually this is on a RAID5 or higher box. Is there any benefit to doing that sort of thing on a RAID1 box? I realize that this is in some ways a matter of opinion, but I would like the opinion of folks with experience. I'm pretty new to Linux in general.

The main services running on these boxes are Apache2, Tomcat6, MySQL, and Java.

I always partition my installs so that there are several partitions. Every person has a different belief and can counter anything that I or anyone else says, just as I can counter them. I would recommend figuring out for yourself what you like and what fits your needs. (lame answer I know)

I don't know what you're going to be using these servers for, but what I have found to work in all situations is to create a /boot partition then install all the others in LVM. I always use the minimal sizes for swap, /, /usr, /tmp, /var, & /home. This way I can go back later and grow the partition if the server gets purposed differently than I planned. I work in a managed hosting business and this way works for all of our customers. (100,000 +)

They're application servers only. No user data (or shouldn't be) so I feel like I don't need to put /home on a separate partition. I guess I was looking at this from a purely a performance perspective, because you may put /boot or most of / on a RAID1 hardware array, but put the data/application portions like MySQL would be on a different RAID5 array. I do tend to get these things mixed up.

I'm intending to go with a /boot, /var/log, swap, and / scheme. I would use lvm if I had more drive space, but there are no slots for additional hard drives so if I run out of space, I don't have anything to extend lvm onto.

Thanks for your suggestion/input. That was very helpful.