pollution of vg00

[Rick Garland]

Someone mentioned to me that there is an RFC out there (somwhere) about the contents of vg00 and how the vg00 should not be polluted.

I am in a debate with overseas peers that say "it doesn't matter"

Any ideas why to find this?

[DCE]

Don't know about the RFC.

However, are you talking about the pollution of vg00, or the mount points within vg00?

If you are referring to the OS mount points, /usr, /opt, /var, the in my opinion it does matter. An errant bit of code, or a a large data write could crash the system by using up all of the lvol space. Not to mention files being placed in directories where they should not be.

If you make new lvols in vg00 for some reason, and keep the information segregated to those lvols, then the pollution is at least somewhat under control - and with large disks that come with the systems today there is a lot of tempting unused space. The caveat here of course is disk aceese - A disk intensive app would probably affect the OS and system performance.........

[Geoff Wild]

The other downside to having say a really large vg00 - and putting everything in it - your ignite image would be huge - it would take longer to ignite, and probably have duplicated data from your application backups.

Rgds...Geoff

[Rick Garland]

I am of the school that you do not pollute vg00. All kinds of problems could result. An example, try making a golden image - you can't because you have crap in vg00! Not to mention backups/ignites/recoveries/full vg00/etc...

I have some overseas admins (India) who insist that it does not matter. I can explain these reasons, point them to these forums, get a Best Practices document; and they continue to put crap in vg00. "We always do it this way" is the response.

Another collegue says there is an RFC. But where?

[Zinky]

I am of the opinion that it really does not matter. With 73GB/140 SCSI system disks fairly common these days - dedicating those disks to purely OS stuff is a waste..

But be mindful of what non-OS/non-System data/lvol you put in your system disk.

In most of my engagements, I have espoused always a minimalist vg00 on a 73/144GB disk consisting of:

/stand - 512MB
/root - 12288
/opt - 8192
/var - 16384
/tmp - 2048

Not concerned with Ignite Backups to Tapes since we do Ignite to a NAS/NFS-Server.

The rest, I establish lvols used for all sorts of low impact storage usage and is skipped from net-ignite backups..

HTH...

[Geoff Wild · Accepted solution]

Not an RFC, but a standard - the home of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

Rgds...Geoff

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Rick:

I too am from the school of minimalism when it comes to vg00. Disk is cheap and I follow a rigid segregation operating system (OS) filesystems from non-OS ones.

While I have not seen any RFC, I'd ask your colleagues how they handle migration (upgrade) from an old to a new server. Having an "unpolluted" vg00 allows one to 'vgexport' non-vg00 volume groups from one server and 'vgimport' them into another in a minimal number of steps.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Rick Garland]

James - they don't do it, which is part of the problem.

They leave it for me to do. And when this is messed up I have to reorganize and do the vgexport/vgimport.

But then I catch hell because I reorganized.

I can't win.

[Rick Garland]

Thanks