Hi Jim, On Monday 04 February 2008 07:04:10 am Jim Albin wrote: > Hello, > I've seen several notes mentioning the disadvantages of using disk > partitions on the storage devices for Lustre OSTs (and/or MDTs). My > questions, if anyone can help me, are; > > 1) Should I delete any existing partitions on the device?
There's no need to explicitely destroy the partitions if you overwrite them. > 2) If not, should I partition the device into a single partition with > a specific block size (maybe 1mb)? No need either. One single partition is still a partition. > 3) Can I just use the disk block device (eg, /dev/sda) when I > mkfs.lustre and is it > smart enough to ignore the partition table? Yes, exactly. Generally speaking, mkfs /dev/sdb will use the whole sdb device for the filesystem, and you won't have any partition table. As a consequence, you won't be able to boot from it, which is not relevant here, but all the other operations will work as on any regular partition (tunefs, mount, etc). > I'm trying to set up Lustre 1.6.3 and am seeing poor performance, > possibly fragmentation on the mdt and ost. > Thanks in advance for any suggestions. I don't know what backend hardware you're using, but in case of Dell MD1000s, you probably can give a look (and a try) at: http://thias.marmotte.net/archives/2008/01/05/Dell-PERC5E-and-MD1000-performance-tweaks.html HTH, Cheers, -- Kilian _______________________________________________ Lustre-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
