10TB filesystem possible on Red Hat 4 EL System?

[Peter Kjellstrom]

On Wednesday 15 August 2007, Sam Flory wrote:
> Jack Murgia wrote:
...
> > Do we need to move to RH or CentOS 5 in order to have a 10TB array?

What do you mean move to RH? You're on RHEL4, right? As for Centos, the only 
difference is the existence of xfs kernel module and xfsprogs, but those 
pacakges could be used on RHEL too.

>   CentOS 5 x86_64 will make things a whole lot easier.  You can then
> either install the xfs module, or the kernel with the xfsprogs rpm from
> the Centos extras tree.

Not quite true nor complete, the xfs stuff lives in centosplus and you will 
not need Centos-5 for this. Centos-4 would work too. x86_64, however, would 
be very close to required for xfs since the 32-bit dist uses 4k kernel stacks 
which in turn does not play well with xfs...

...
>   Ext3 can in theory work on a 10TB file system,

Not on RHEL4 (which is what the OP has). Read:
 http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/

Only RHEL5 x86_64 can go to 16TiB.

>   but I've yet to meet 
> people who are very happy with the results over a TB, or 2.

I'm one. Depending on the hardware ext3 can be as good as 10-15% slower than 
xfs on such a size. And that is, IMHO, not worth the xfs hassle (manual 
intervention on kernel updates, dangerous full fillsystem situations, less 
mainstream...).

End of comments,
 Peter

> (Well yes 
> there are some ext3 developers....) What is going wrong with your setup?
>  You are using GPT, and a 4K block size so it should in theory just take
> an insane amount of time to create the filesystem.  (A really really
> really long time.) Did you try rebooting between creation of the
> partition table, and trying to mke2fs?  (Sometimes the kernel refuses to
> update the partition table.)
>
> PS- If you bought a copy of RHEL you can download RHEL 5 off th RHN.
> Also you are entitled to ask RH for installation support.
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