Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Planning a Workgroup
Setting Disk-Management Strategy
Chapter 276
Setting Disk-Management Strategy
This section covers:
• “Distributing Disks” on page 76
Which systems should you attach the workgroup’s disks to?
• “Capacity Planning” on page 77
How much disk space do you need?
• “Disk-Management Tools” on page 79
LVM, mirroring, striping - what are they and what are they for?
Distributing Disks
Read these guidelines in conjunction with “Distributing Applications and
Data” on page 61.
• Concentrate file system capacity on file and application servers.
A workgroup in which every system is sufficient unto itself is an
administrator’s nightmare. The desktop is a bad place to store:
— Applications (unless the user takes explicit responsibility for
maintaining them).
— Data (except data that does not need to be backed up).
• Make sure each workstation has a local disk.
Even a “diskless” client needs sufficient local disk space to swap
locally. NFS Diskless (available on some 10.x systems) does allow
clients to swap to a server’s disks, but performance probably won’t be
acceptable.
• Ideally, put data and applications on separate servers, so that the file
server’s CPU is occupied mainly with processing NFS requests, while
the application server runs applications.