Best practice disk setup in enterprise environments

SUSE Product Topics SLES Install-Boot
1

I’m looking for pointers about best-practice for disk setup of SLES
as a virtual guest on basically any hypervisor, though primarily
VMware/KVM/XEN in x86_64 enterprise environments.
Mainly I’m hoping for guidance on how to treat /boot and being able
to use LVM for all filesystems while still be able to resize these
online without having to cope with partitions.
The best would be if it had been possible to just create everything
as logical volumes on the first disk directly without having to
create any partition. But then there’s the problem of booting off an
LVM. AFAICT that’s still not supported.
This is just for the root disk, the data disks are treated as plain
LVM PV’s with no partition created as that gives the best ability
to resize online overtime as data grows.

Thanks for your thoughts

2

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3

Hi,

I typically set up my VMs with a 500MB partition for /boot and the remainder for LVM.

From trouble with (much) earlier versions I decided to configure LVM on the host machine to consider only explicitly defined PVs (had some Dom0/DomU VG name clashes that lead to nasty results), so activating the guest VG during pygrub handling wouldn’t work here anyhow. Using that dedicated /boot partition isn’t much of a hassle, so I’d say it’s worth it.

Regards,
Jens