Partition size recommendations

[spins]

I am way new to Linux and am getting thrown into the deep end. My company is rolling out a Linux environment to support an application we are using. We are using RHEL for the OS. Does anyone have any recommendations for partition sizes?

I'm sorry if the question is elementary, being all new to this I thought I would ask.

The vendor gave the recommendations of:

100mb for /boot
4GB for swap
other for /

From what I can tell that appears to be the default values if you do a 'wife install' (yes, yes, yes, yes, yes) on RHEL. These might be just fine, but I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions.

Thanks for the help!

[goude]

I'm using Fedora and usually I give 5 to 8 Gigs for the root partition, 4Gigs for swap and all the rest is storage space.

Once the kernel in one of the machines here went loco and wrote a massive log file in the root partition and since then I'm always generous about the root partition.

[oz]

The vendor gave the recommendations of:

100mb for /boot
4GB for swap
other for /

Welcome to the forums!

I usually do mine more like the following:

/boot... if you are going to have a separate /boot partition, the 100MB suggested should be plenty.

swap... I have 8GB of RAM, but only use a 1GB swap partition, and it never gets used at all. If you have plenty of RAM, I'd not use a 4GB swap partition. Some users don't create a swap partition at all if they have plenty of RAM.

/... mine is usually created using about 10GB to 20 GB if I have plenty of spare space on the hard disk.

/home... mine is usually created using about 10GB to 20 GB if I have plenty of spare space on the hard disk.

[reed9]

For servers, it can be a good idea to separate out more than just boot, root, swap, and home. Generally it's recommended to also have a separate /var partition. As for how big that ought to be, depends on what you're doing. An mail or print server probably ought to be fairly large.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/requ...ts.html#number
Linux Partitioning mini-FAQ

[Rubberman]

For servers, it can be a good idea to separate out more than just boot, root, swap, and home. Generally it's recommended to also have a separate /var partition. As for how big that ought to be, depends on what you're doing. An mail or print server probably ought to be fairly large.

Partitioning requirements
Linux Partitioning mini-FAQ

I pretty much agree with this. As for the comments about swap, I have 8GB of RAM and allocated 16GB to a swap partition (running 64-bits). Even though the swap space is mostly unused, there are times when you will need it, and if it isn't there you are SOL until you allocate more swap space, if you have it at the time. I used the old Unix system rule-of-thumb, swap = 2x ram.

For /boot, a 1GB space is reasonable. 100M won't do it in many cases. I am currently using 180MB of my partition for the installed kernels, drivers, and crash images. Given current pricing on disc space, don't be parsimonious about the amount of space you allocate to system partitions. My root file system currently is utilizing about 32GB of the 250+GB available. That gives me headroom for more applications, libraries, mail server space (when I decide to host my own mail server), etc. I didn't create a separate /var partition simply to make things simpler when I installed the OS originally. FYI, I am running CentOS 5.4, the community version of RHEL, so these numbers are not out of line for what you might need.

[spins]

Thanks for all the information! I appreciate the help and the direction this is giving to me.

A couple more questions about this so I can try to get my head around the partitions vs. the drive letters.

I'm rolling the first 3 RHEL servers in my VMWare (ESX 3.5) enviroment. Typically when I spin up a new microsoft OS, I will allocate 15GB to the C drive and 30+ (depending on the application) to the D drive. Since I have the space to spare on my SAN, should I create 1 large LUN and present it to the RHEL, being hosted by VMWare, and then partition it up that way? Or is there benefit to creating to separate LUN's and presenting them both to my VM hosted RHEL?

I'm using RHEL 5.4 and it will be used to host a MYSQL database only. Because it's for a billing application we are rolling out, the server will not function as anything other then the database server.

The 3 servers being hosted in my VMWare environment will be Dev, Test, and Train. I will have a dedicated server for production. I will take what I glean from the Dev/Test/Train setups and extrapolate the numbers out to match the hard spec for my Prod server.

Thanks again for all the help!

[ajithpillai]

Well the thumb rule is give maximum space for root and /home, double the space of RAM of the machine for /swap. Well if you have a machine of 40GB with 1GB RAM this is how the partition should be..

/boot 100MB
/home 5000MB
SWAP 2000MB
/tmp 5000MB
/ 10000MB

Even after defining these partitions you could later change the partitions using the code

fdisk /dev/sda

...all the best