New San Help for Linux -- what to do , best practice?

[booya213]

Hello all,
Im new to san (used to nfs).

I have a netapp connected to my linux machine via qlogic fiber channel cards. I intend on getting dm-multipath working. But I have a problem, or maybe I just dont know what to do.

Im trying to figure out how I am going to mount this. Do I just fdisk /dev/sdb && mkfs and just mount /dev/path/to/multipathdisk via "mount /dev/path/to/multipathdisk /new/mountpoint" ???

What happens if the netapp admin grows the lun in size? Wont that screw up that partition? How would I force it to recognize the new size of that lun or disk? Would that screw up my file system?


I was also thinking I could just setup the /dev/path/to/multpathdisk and add it into LVM. And instead of growing the LUN, he would hand me off another lun, and I would add it logically into the volume and grow it that way...


Whats the best practice for this scenario... I prefer the first method due to simplicity, but am worried if we grow the file system it might get F'd up.

What to do

 

[victorv]

hi,
in this scenario (AIX or Linux), I use the 2nd method:

I build on SAN, fixed LUNs, say 10 GB each, from a RAID5
of 3...14 disks.
Your system will see new disks of 10GB each.

Then you build by these disks a LV (using LVM), and mount
data file system under /home/mydata.
When you see that this fs is low in free space:
define another LUN, assign it to yuor servers (HBAs),
add the disk in the LV,
and depending from OS, enlarge the fs.

Try this now, before put your system in production, beginning with 2 LUNs and after all is done, add a 3rd LUN.

ciao
vittorio

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

option 3 : order snapdrive for Unix, and let the software sort it out for you ... Enlarge luns on the fly, snapdrive for unix interacts with your LVM.

rgds,

R.