Filesystem for Stores, and partitioning.

[AimanA]

What would you recommend as the filesystem to use for the Mail store? I read through the quickstart guide and it told me how to divide the partitions up, but it made no mention of which FS to use.

My system will have a sATA boot drive, which will be partitioned to hold /boot, /var, and / (I will most likely use ext3, as it is provided as the default FS by OpenSuSE10.2)

The drive that will house the Zimbra application and stores, /opt, will live on a Promise 4-disk SCSI connected IDE array, running in a 0+1 configuration. I would like to wring as much performance out of Zimbra as humanly possible, as my users are speed conscious I.T. people.

I'l be custom rolling a kernel as well to pull non-essential drivers and stuff out. SuSE builds the whole kernel as +M so its huge. heh.

I'd also like to address the un-intelligent suggestions on how to partition the drives as recommended by Zimbra. Certain directories off root should be kept in their own partitions so as to assist in disaster recovery, and /var should be its own partition so that logs don't fill up /. Thoughts?

[jholder]

Hello, and Welcome to the Zimbra Forums!
I have my own personal opinion on this subject.
A while back, I wiped our server. I found with ext3, I\we wasn't able to recover or read the inodes. It just kept saying, "YOU IDIOT! The data is friggin GONE!"

With discovery, I found that if I had ext2, I would have had more of a chance. Most people want the data gone, but me. . . I'd rather know that if I accidentally erased something, and I didn't have a backup, I could attempt recovery.

Also, I have an entire 800GIG drive mounted as the /opt dir. That way, the entire drive is only zimbra. Then when I backup, I backup to hda1, a totally different drive as opposed to an utter meltdown.

Hope my logic makes sense, and good luck,
john

[AimanA]

I am going to do the same. About 800GB Raid will be mounted as /opt.
The rest of the system will be partitioned as follows:

hda(x)
ext3 /boot 100mb
swap swap 8GB (2x 4gb RAM)
ext3 /var 10GB
ext3 / Remainder of drive

sda(x)
???? /opt ~800GB (SCSI IDE RAID)

I was considering putting /bin and a couple of other directories in their own partition, but it really doesnt matter, since hda will most likely be mirrored in hardware.

[AimanA]

Sooo... if you can't tell me what FS to use.... what types of read/write transactions are being performed, that will point me in the right direction at least. Lots of small reads/writes? Major file read/writes?

I figure since it's email, it will be a large number of smaller disk transactions. Right?