[lug] Swap space, /boot and RAID and LVM

[Elyse M. Grasso]

My big server is now up and running, (and being loaded with a bunch of stuff 
from one of the servers at my office, since I have the space and we've had 
some problems with backup/restore reliability.)

I'm currently running Fedora 7. (I still kind of miss KRUD, though). 

I have 4 physical hard drives, two dual core Opterons, 4 gigs of ram in two 
dual channel banks.

I'm going to start playing with different LVM and RAID configurations.  I 
think I eventually want LVM on top of RAID 10, partly to get maximum 
experience with the admin tools.  

I've been googling about RAID and LVM and found enough information to be 
confusing (probably because some of it is fairly old and may be obsolete). 
Pointers to current, reliable docs would be appreciated.

/boot is not LVM-able but I have seen some references to RAIDing it

 I notice that there seems to be some debate about the advisability and safety 
of RAIDing swap. Fedora put swap in an LVM volume, so I assume that is safe. 

I also noticed that the swap created by anaconda is only (!) 1.94 Gigs. I know 
at one time it was recommended that swap space should equal physical memory. 
Is that no longer recommended with very large memories? (I haven't had time 
to read the latest installment of the memory series on LWN yet today). 

The server is going to be used (among other things) for testing build 
automation tools, with some virtual machines loaded so I can test them in 
different environments. Probably with at least one windows XP guest.

Opinions: should I increase the swap while I am thrashing the disk 
partitioning? 


Is anyone else going to MileHiCon this weekend?
-- 
Elyse Grasso

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