Storage Administration Guide
- About This Guide
- 1 Overview of File Systems in Linux
- 2 What’s New for Storage in SLES 11
- 3 Planning a Storage Solution
- 4 LVM Configuration
- 5 Resizing File Systems
- 6 Using UUIDs to Mount Devices
- 7 Managing Multipath I/O for Devices
- 8 Software RAID Configuration
- 9 Configuring Software RAID1 for the Root Partition
- 10 Managing Software RAIDs 6 and 10 with mdadm
- 11 Resizing Software RAID Arrays with mdadm
- 12 Storage Enclosure LED Utilities for MD Software RAIDs
- 13 iSNS for Linux
- 14 Mass Storage over IP Networks: iSCSI
- 15 Mass Storage over IP Networks: iSCSI LIO Target Server
- 16 Fibre Channel Storage over Ethernet Networks: FCoE
- 17 LVM Volume Snapshots
- 18 Managing Access Control Lists over NFSv4
- 19 Troubleshooting Storage Issues
- A GNU Licenses
- B Documentation Updates
3 Planning a Storage Solution
Consider what your storage needs are and how you can effectively manage and divide your storage space to best meet your needs. Use the information in this section to help plan your storage deployment for file systems on your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server server.
3.1 Partitioning Devices #
For information about using the YaST Expert Partitioner, see Section “Using the YaST Partitioner”, Chapter 15, Advanced Disk Setup, Deployment Guide.
3.2 Multipath Support #
Linux supports using multiple I/O paths for fault-tolerant connections between the server and its storage devices. Linux multipath support is disabled by default. If you use a multipath solution that is provided by your storage subsystem vendor, you do not need to configure the Linux multipath separately.
3.3 Software RAID Support #
Linux supports hardware and software RAID devices. If you use hardware RAID devices, software RAID devices are unnecessary. You can use both hardware and software RAID devices on the same server.
To maximize the performance benefits of software RAID devices, partitions used for the RAID should come from different physical devices. For software RAID 1 devices, the mirrored partitions cannot share any disks in common.
3.4 File System Snapshots #
Linux supports file system snapshots.
3.5 Backup and Antivirus Support #
3.5.1 Open Source Backup #
Open source tools for backing up data on Linux include
tar, cpio, and
rsync. See the man pages for these tools for more
information.
PAX: POSIX File System Archiver. It supports
cpioandtar, which are the two most common forms of standard archive (backup) files. See the man page for more information.Amanda: The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. See www.amanda.org (http://www.amanda.org/).
3.5.2 Commercial Backup and Antivirus Support #
Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES) 2 for Linux is a product that includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10. Antivirus and backup software vendors who support OES 2 also support SLES 10. You can visit the vendor Web sites to find out about their scheduled support of SLES 11.
For a current list of possible backup and antivirus software vendors, see Novell Open Enterprise Server Partner Support: Backup and Antivirus Support (http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/partners_communities.html). This list is updated quarterly.