User Guide

4 Installing 7signal Sapphire 7
7signal Solutions Inc., 526 S. Main Street, Akron, Ohio 44311, USA, 855-763-9526, [e-mail],
www.7signal.com
7signal Sapphire Deployment Guide Release 5.0
4 INSTALLING 7SIGNAL SAPPHIRE
4.1 Operating System installation tips
It is recommended to install the operating system by using the graphical installer.
4.1.1 Hard disk partitioning
This chapter gives some guidelines for hard disk partitioning. It is assumed that readers have
comprehensive knowledge about Linux file systems, RAID, LVM and disk partitioning. This chapter does
not cover basic partitioning requirements, e.g. configuring boot and swap partitions are not covered.
Swap is required by the DB2 database. Size of the swap must be 2 x RAM size.
Laptop installations
Default partitioning suggested by the OS installer is suitable for most of the cases. As laptops are rarely
equipped with multiple hard drives, RAID configurations are not possible.
Server installations
It is recommended to configure at least one RAID array: 7signal databases and database log files should
reside on a file system on top of RAIDed disks (RAID level 1 or higher, LVM on top of RAID). Multiple
RAIDed file systems are also suitable, for example, OS installation could be on file system on RAID1, and
databases on file system on top of RAID5.
It is suggested that LVM is used on top of RAIDs: this makes possible to easily add a new RAID array as a
LVM physical volume, if the existing ones run out of disk space. On large server installations (having tens
of monitoring stations producing large amount of measurement data), it is also suggested that database
log files should be placed on different physical disk than the actual databases. This will improve database
performance by reducing serialized disk access.
Example #1
 Two physical disks
 Boot and swap partitions
 RAID1 on top of disks, formatted as LVM physical volume
 Physical volume split into three logical volumes
o 10% of space for OS installation, mount point “/” (LV1)
o 70% of space for databases and database log files, mount point
/opt/7signal/databases (LV2)
o 20% of space for database backups, mount point /opt/7signal/backups (LV3)
 Sapphire installation
o Sapphire components are installed to /opt/7signal (on LV1)
o Sapphire databases are installed to /opt/7signal/databases (on LV2) (7signal DBMS
installer asks for location of databases and database log files)
o Sapphire database backups will be placed on /opt/7signal/backups (on LV3)
Example #2
 Five physical disks
 Boot and swap partitions
 RAID1 on top of two disk, RAID5 on top of tree disks, all formatted as LVM physical volume
 Physical volume on RAID1 has two logical volumes