Just a comment though : the command : “lvm lvresize -l 10240 /dev/mapper/vg00-var” extended the volume to 10x the initial size (which was 4Go) making it 40 Go and not extended the volume up to 10 Go as explained in your article… but the command is the same to reduce the volume so… no problem after all :p Cheers from France.

The main reason these days for using partitions is that of reliability and fault tolerance. Each partition has it’s own file system root with super-block structure so if there is a media failure or system crash then you have limited the amount of damage that can be done to the file systems. There is an overhead to having more partitions as the kernel needs to keep all these structures in memory but in my opinion it is worth it. Disk caching works on a file system bases too, so that could help with performance at the cost of more RAM.

If you run a busy server system to house something like Oracle Financials, SAP or even resellers web server it’s not easy to predict how the system will grow so having an amount of unallocated disk space has a real benefit. A good example of this is home directories /home/m/mrn, /home/d/davida, /home/d/davidb. Originally /home would be a single partition. Half the people at my company seem to be called David (which is a great name btw!) so you may want to create a new partition for /home/d to put all the Davids into e.g. /home/d/davida, /home/d/davidb and /home/d/davidc. There will come a day when /home/d has consumed all the physical disk space and you’ll need to buy another. All the allocated /home/d can go back in the pot and you can mount the new disk under /home/d. Or you could add the new disk to the logical volume pool and pimp it’s extends to create a new partition but there are pros and cons with this solution too.

Volume managers are pretty clever these days, so it’s less important to “grow” the system as it used to be. I’m a bit old school so when I needed an extra 10GB as a scratch working area to hold mysqldump files during the backup or wanted to add a bit of extra swap space to speed up the system then I had it immediately available and I could place it anywhere I wanted without having to add symbolic links. If you needed the extra web space under an Apache document route then Apache’s configuration has to change to traverse symbolic links and everything can get a bit more complicated.

In answer to your question, yes you can just split it all up because you can reduce the size of a partition later. I like to see where the space is going so that there aren’t any surprises and I have some extra space in my back pocket for emergencies.

I have one of the L4 Core i machines with 1TB and have opted to just put 700GB on the /var/ volume, and 100 each on the /home and /usr partitions and this will still give some room should I need to bump up root or tmp or just add more to the already-increased ones.

I do monitor my machines with NAGIOS but really, do I want to have to do this every few months or is any performance increase worth adding space gradually?

I hope that my article offers something extra. It also gives you information on how to discover what the system comes with, practical advice on whether to extend a volume or create a new one and help with the maths you need to get the correct number of extends.

Thanks for the link though, I’ll add it to the article in the extra help section.

http://faq.1and1.co.uk/server/root_server/linux_admin_help/7.html

Chris

I just got a 1and1 server and was wondering whether they messed something up again (as they frequently do). My previous server from 1and1, which I had about 2 years ago, had all the space allocated (most of it to /var), so I didn’t have to change anything…

Thanks for taking the time to explain things, too, as it really helps.