I'm currently in a trap where I have my drives formated entirely with one partition each and xfs. I want to experiment with Oracle ASM, LVM and possibly some cluster type filesystem. Since all my drives are allocated I can't play without purchasing another HD.


I have four drives. 3x250G 1x160G. I was thinking of redoing my drives in 25G or 10G partitions. So I'd have either a total of 36.4 or 91 small chunks. This way I can allocated/deallocated to the various volume managers. And when I want to play with something that needs a raw disk partition I just pull it out of the volume manager as needed.

Aside from the complete nightmare if I want to pull a full disk, anyone have any thoughts? Anything I haven't thought of? Is there a general guideline for doing this I could follow?

There's no guide except sensibility. For example, 10GB is probably enough for all the system files and apps; if you have a digital camera and take a lot of photos, then 100GB for a /home directory vanishes very quickly. If you want to play around with some systems and then wipe them, then 10GB is probably enough for the full system. How many different systems do you want to play with at one time?

Simply dividing all disks into equal size partitions is not sensible at all; setting up each permanent system will be a nightmare, and if you generate a lot of data you'll be forever running out of space.

10 gig partitions are big enough if you have one large partition for sharing data. It is still bit of a pain transferring data especially if you work with large files like iso and dvds. I have settled on 20 gig partitions and this works well.

I prefer to include the /home directory in the /root partition for each operating system. There seems to be less hassles sharing the data partition especially if operating systems are coming and going.

First of all, you could resize the current partitions with data on them using gparted. Assuming of course there is free space on the partitions.

Second, you should really make the partitions how you need them. I usually make separate partitions for /boot /home /usr /tmp /var and the root partition (/). Just think how much would any of them need.

The plan is to allocate space using lvm2. So for my photos (currently 50G) I would make a volume with 60G (6 x 10G). Then as it grows I add another 10G and extent the ext3.

My server only has 4 sata slots, which are all full. So to remove/upgrate a single drive, I have to find space for everything on that drive. With lvm and oracle asm. I just tell the volume manager to remove those PV's Then let it find the space for me. So that's problem one I hope to solve with LVM. For this I could just make two partitions. half and half.

But then I thought. If the Oracle asm is 90% free and I need some space for my digital photos on LVM, two partitions wouldn't be good. So I come up with the idea of many smaller chunks. That way I can allocated/deallocate back and forth as needed.

The final thought on all this was if something new come around. If the partitions are two big and I need to play with that "something new" and I'm using 5 M of a big partition I may not be able to pull it out.

Hope that makes what I'm doing a little more clear? I senced a little confusion when you guys started talking about 10G wouldn't be enough for digital photos. With LVM or even RAID0 I could strip all these together to make a big /home dir.