Installation guide

Chapter 2.
3
Storage Considerations During
Installation
Many storage device and file system settings can only be configured at install time. Other settings,
such as file system type, can only be modified up to a certain point without requiring a reformat. As
such, it is prudent that you plan your storage configuration accordingly before installing Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6.
This chapter discusses several considerations when planning a storage configuration for your system.
For actual installation instructions (including storage configuration during installation), refer to the
Installation Guide provided by Red Hat.
2.1. Updates to Storage Configuration During Installation
Installation configuration for the following settings/devices has been updated for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 6:
Fibre-Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
Anaconda can now configure FCoE storage devices during installation.
Storage Device Filtering Interface
Anaconda now has improved control over which storage devices are used during installation. You can
now control which devices are available/visible to the installer, in addition to which devices are actually
used for system storage. There are two paths through device filtering:
Basic Path
For systems that only use locally attached disks and firmware RAID arrays as storage devices
Advanced Path
For systems that use SAN (e.g. multipath, iSCSI, FCoE) devices
Auto-partitioning and /home
Auto-partitioning now creates a separate logical volume for the /home file system when 50GB or
more is available for allocation of LVM physical volumes. The root file system (/) will be limited to a
maximum of 50GB whe creating a separate /home logical volume, but the /home logical volume will
grow to occupy all remaining space in the volume group.
2.2. Overview of Supported File Systems
This section shows basic technical information on each file system supported by Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 6.
Table 2.1. Technical Specifications of Supported File Systems
File
System
Max
Supported
Size
Max File
Size
Max
Subdirectories
(per
directory)
Max
Depth of
Symbolic
Links
ACL
Support
Details
Ext2 8TB 2TB 32,000 8 Yes N/A