So Christmas vacation I plan to rebuild my server with a new drive configuration. I will have an AMD 4000+ 64 bit proc at 2.4 GHz with 4 GB of ram in this box.

I will have a 40 GB IDE drive (primarily for storage and boot)
I have a 20 GB ID drive available to my disposal (I'm thinking about using this for swap, that's where my question is)

I will have 3x 500 GB SATA Drives in a Software RAID 5 Array

I will be using CentOS x64 version 5 for my host OS with VMware Server on top of it

My question is what would my recommended partitioning scheme be?

My initial thought was to put "/boot" on a 100 meg part on the 40 gig, a 6 GB swap partition on the 40 gig, and the rest of "/" on the 40 gig with "/home/vms" on the 1 TB RAID 5 for my VM's. and not use the 20 GB.

Then I thought maybe since I have a 20 gig laying around I should do "/boot" on a 100 meg part on the 20 gig, along with the 6 GB swap part ont he 20 gig. Install the rest of the system to / on the 40 gig and /home/vms on the raid 5.

I'm still unsure on what I should do for the partitioning scheme.

Any suggestions?

thanks.

Use all the drives and use LVM except /boot which shouldn't be on an LVM. But it's always a good idea to create seperate paritions for /, usr, tmp, home and var. One big / is just a bad thing if your drive does happen to fill up. A layout like this would work:

/boot - 100MB ext3

LVM - PV1
/ - 1024MB
/usr - 4096MB
/tmp - 1024MB
/var - 1024MB
/home - 8192MB
swap - 4096MB

RAID5 + LVM - PV2
/data - 20240MB # for your virtual machines

That way your not using all available space but you can grow each when necessary.