linux hardware raid 10 / lvm / virtual machine partition alignment and filesystem optimization
- by Jason Ward
I've been reading everything I can find about partition alignment and filesystem optimization (ext4 and xfs) but still don't know enough to be confident in setting up my current configuration. My remaining confusion comes from the LVM layer and if I should use raid parameters on the filesystem in guest os'es.
My main questions are:
When I use 'pvcreate --dataalignment' do I use the stripe-width as calculated for a filesystem on RAID (128kB for ext4 in my situation), the Stripe size of the RAID set (256kB), something else altogether, or do I not need this?
When I create ext2/3/4 or xfs filesystems in guests on the Logical Volumes, should I add the settings for the underlying RAID (e.g. mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 -E stride=64,stripe-width=128)?
Does anyone see any glaring errors in my set up below? I'm running some benchmarks now but haven't done enough to start comparing results.
I have four drives in RAID 10 on a 3ware 9750-4i controller (more details on the settings below) giving me a 6.0TB device at /dev/sda. Here is my partition table:
Model: LSI 9750-4i DISK (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 5722024MiB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1.00MiB 257MiB 256MiB ext4 BOOTPART boot
2 257MiB 4353MiB 4096MiB linux-swap(v1)
3 4353MiB 266497MiB 262144MiB ext4
4 266497MiB 4460801MiB 4194304MiB
Partition 1 is to be the /boot partition for my xen host.
Partition 2 is swap.
Partition 3 is to be the root (/) for my xen host.
Partition 4 is to be (the only) physical volume to be used by LVM
(for those who are counting, I left about 1.2TB unallocated for now)
For my Xen guests, I usually create a Logical Volume of the needed size and present it to the guests for them to partition as needed. I know there are other ways of handling that but this method works best for my situation.
Here's the hardware of interest on my CentOS 6.3 Xen Host:
4x Seagate Barracuda 3TB ST3000DM001 Drives (sector size: 512 logical/4096 physical)
3ware 9750-4i w/BBU (sector size reported: 512 logical/512 physical)
All four drives make up a RAID 10 array.
Stripe: 256kB
Write Cache enabled
Read Cache: intelligent
StoreSave: Balance
Thanks!
