Using parted and LVM2 for large partitions

Using parted and LVM2 for large partitions

I wanted to spread a partition across two RAID cards, one drive partition on each card. Here is the server's physical drive configuration.

|-RAID0-|-RAID5---------|
| 00 01 | 02 03 04 05 06|

|-RAID5------------------------------------|
| 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13|

The second RAID5 is a few TB and fdisk won't work on partitions larger than 2TB, so I useparted to create a partition that fills the free space.

# parted /dev/sdc
GNU Parted 1.8.1
Using /dev/sdc
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print

Model: DELL PERC 5/E Adapter (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3893GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start  End  Size  File system  Name  Flags

(parted) mklabel gpt

(parted) mkpart primary 0 3893G
(parted) print

Model: DELL PERC 5/E Adapter (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 3893GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name     Flags
1      17.4kB  3893GB  3893GB               primary

(parted) quit

Then I use LVM2 to combine the two RAIDs, sdb1 and sdc1, into one logical volume.

# pvcreate /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
Physical volume "/dev/sdb1" successfully created
Physical volume "/dev/sdc1" successfully created
# vgcreate nsm_vg /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
Volume group "nsm_vg" successfully created
# pvscan
PV /dev/sdb1   VG nsm_vg   lvm2 [272.25 GB / 632.00 GB free]
PV /dev/sdc1   VG nsm_vg   lvm2 [3.54 TB / 3.54 TB free]
Total: 2 [1.94 TB] / in use: 2 [1.94 TB] / in no VG: 0 [0   ]

# lvcreate -L 3897G -n nsm_lv nsm_vg
Logical volume "nsm_lv" created

# mkfs.ext3 -m 1 /dev/nsm_vg/nsm_lv
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
528482304 inodes, 1056964608 blocks
10569646 blocks (1.00%) reserved for the super user
First nsm block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
32256 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
16384 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632,
2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000, 214990848, 512000000, 550731776, 644972544

Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 34 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

# mount /dev/mapper/nsm_vg-nsm_lv /nsm

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
---snip---
/dev/mapper/nsm_vg-nsm_lv
     3.8T  196M  3.8T   1% /nsm

Now I can put the entry for mounting /nsm into /etc/fstab.

NOTE:

Suggest you to mount the partition with "defaults,async,noatime", which helps make things more efficient when you're doing a constant stream of writes, as sguil does with PCAP files.