Topic: Upgrade to SME8 with new larger disk array ?

[mdrum]

I have an SME 7.6 server with 4 X 1TiB drives.  Its set up as raid 5 with a hot swap drive.   I am upgrading to SME 8.0 at the same time I want to increase the disk space by replacing the four 1TiB drives with four 2TiB drives (or even 3TiB Drives) .  In effect doubling the available disk space.     In reading this forum there are a lot of posts on issues with SME 8.0 and large arrays.  I am finding them quite confusing .   

Is the bottom line that "out of the box"  SME 8.0 will not install correctly where the array is greater than 2TiB ?  or its it were the  individual drives in the array are greater than  1TiB ?   

Thanks
Mike Drummond 

[Stefano]

I remember I installed (only for a test) a SME8 on a 4x1.5 TiB raid5 (no spare) array.. no problems at all..
YMMV

[chris burnat]

I have an SME 7.6 server with 4 X 1TiB drives.  Its set up as raid 5 with a hot swap drive.   I am upgrading to SME 8.0 at the same time I want to increase the disk space by replacing the four 1TiB drives with four 2TiB drives (or even 3TiB Drives) .  In effect doubling the available disk space.     In reading this forum there are a lot of posts on issues with SME 8.0 and large arrays.  I am finding them quite confusing .   

Is the bottom line that "out of the box"  SME 8.0 will not install correctly where the array is greater than 2TiB ?  or its it were the  individual drives in the array are greater than  1TiB ?   

Thanks
Mike Drummond

Mike, SME8 will not recognise drive based on GPT partitioning, this is applicable to drive larger than 2TB.
Check: http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,48093.0.html

[janet]

mdrum & other readers (FYI & ease of "resolution")

SME8 will not recognise drive based on GPT partitioning, this is applicable to drive larger than 2TB.
Check: http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,48093.0.html

The most pertinent parts of that thread are:

At this stage (Oct 2012), and based on Redhat bug resolution (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467848)
In SME8 (based on CentOS 5), GPT partitioning is not supported regardless of the size of the hard drive. 

In SME7 (based on CentOS 4), GPT partitioning is partly supported, the system will install OK but the total useable size of all partitions will be limited to 2TB.

and

A bug report has been opened at Bugzilla:
http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6799
Please follow there.

In addition, if you follow all the links in this thread, which then link you to other threads & bug reports, you will find the following quite old (2006) but practical answer to safely create large arrays, which requires specific hardware & regular maintenance with kernel version specific drivers.
It could be affectionally titled "How did Shad do it ?"
I do not know if Shad is still doing that way in 2012 with sme8, I seem to recall he does not use SME server to support the web backend requirements that keep contribs.org etc going.
http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1963
Referring in particular to this comment
http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1963#c2

[mdrum]

Thank You all for the help  I have got it.

The easy approach is to create any large array from disks 2TiB or smaller.  Thats straight forward.  Now I just need to check I have enough SATA ports on the MB if I want to use more than the current 4 drives.   


Regards
Mike drummond