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We recently purchased HP Lefthand 4500 G2 24TB box and also a DL380 G7 server. I'm running Centos 6.2 (RHEL 6.2).

The Lefthand box consist of 12 2TB HD's configured in RAID6. That gives me about 14.7TB usable space.

Scenario : iSCSI SAN for Fileserver at Advertising Agency.

Are there any recommendations / best practices on filesystem creation on iSCSI LUN's ? Regarding EXT4 or XFS? Write barriers, mkfs options on creating the filesystem ? Like, inode64, noatime etc....

XFS is preferred tho, as we will be hosting a large volume with >=1millions of files. My Plan is to create 6-8TB volume at the start.

As for now, the server and or Lefthand box is not connected to UPS, but will be real soon.

I have had really good experience with XFS over the last 10 years with large volumes but not so, if not at all any experience with EXT3/4 on large volumes.

Any recommendations and or help would be much appreciated.

Thanks allot. Best regards,

Svavar Reykjavik - Iceland

Svavar O
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I don't know the nitty gritty linux details, but if you have thin provisioning and you want it to work, make sure your file system doesn't write all over the drive.

Basil
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  • The only option I know about for XFS, is the inode64 option when mounting. If I don't use the inode64 option the inodes will be stuck on the first 1TB (regardless of the rest). (more info : http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_FAQ#Q:_What_is_the_inode64_mount_option_for.3F ) – Svavar O May 29 '12 at 14:18