Technical Note: [Accelops KB] How to set up large local disk for AO-VA

Andy_G · ‎09-27-2016

Description

Summary of Topic

For storing events for a long time, customer must have large disk space for event storage (eventdb in Accelops VA). There are two ways to do it.

First and the best way, customer can install eventdb on dedicated NFS server, such as NetApp. As a NFS mount point, Accelops VA doesn't have any restriction on the size of the NFS volume and customer can add new disks to the NFS server without impacting the operation of Accelops VA.
Customer can also have large disk space on local storage. But Accelops VA is running on VMware ESX which has 2TB disk space limitation. VMware ESX can not recognize hard disk (or RAID) more than 2TB and can not create virtual disks more than 2TB.

This document explains how to support disks more than 2TB in Accelops VA. But be sure you communicate to customer that, because we stripe all disks together as software RAID 0, any disk fails will cause the full file system unrecoverable crash. Customer has to take their own risk.

Assume:

Customer has a server with three disks (physical disks or VMDK): 1X160GB, 2X2TB

Goal:

Accelops VA will install on 160GB disk
Customer data will be installed on the two 2TB disks as a logic volume, which is 4TB total

Steps

Setup ESX and add the three disks to datastore. Name the 160GB disk as LD01, other two as LD02 and LD03
Refer to Accelops VA installation document to import VA on local datastore LD01
Add LD02 and LD03 as new virtual disks on ESX for Accelops VA.

Start Accelops VA and accept the license until the VMware console appears. Before go for any other configuration, finish the following steps to create a logic volume including LD02 and LD03.

Login the system with root account, the default password is ProspectHills

Run "fdisk -l" and you will display the disk info as following

Disk /dev/sda: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes
  255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders
  Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 
   Device Boot     
  Start        
  End     
  Blocks   Id  System
  /dev/sda1  
  *          
  1          16      128488+  83  Linux
  /dev/sda2             
  17         799     6289447+  82  Linux swap /
  Solaris
  /dev/sda3            
  800        5221    35519715   83  Linux
 
  Disk /dev/sdb: 1946.1 GB, 1946135581696 bytes
  255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 236604 cylinders
  Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 =
  8225280 bytes
 
  Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid
  partition table
 
  Disk /dev/sdc: 1990.1 GB, 1990116046848 bytes
  255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 241951 cylinders
  Units = cylinders of 16065 *
  512 = 8225280 bytes
 
  Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid
  partition table

Create physical volume: pvcreate /dev/sdb

Physical volume "/dev/sdb" successfully created

Create physical volume: pvcreate /dev/sdc

Physical volume "/dev/sdc" successfully created

Create volume group: vgcreate vg1 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

Volume group "vg1" successfully created

Run 'vgdisplay vg1 | grep "Total PE"'

Total PE 938474

Create logic volume: lvcreate -n lg1 -l 938474 vg1

Logical volume "lg1" created

Format Logical volume lg1: mkfs /dev/vg1/lg1

mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
  Filesystem
  label=
  OS type: Linux
  Block size=4096 (log=2)
  Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
  480509952 inodes, 960997376 blocks
  48049868 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
  First data block=0
  Maximum filesystem
  blocks=4294967296
  29328 block groups
  32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
  16384 inodes per group
  Superblock backups stored on
  blocks:
        32768, 98304,
  163840,
  229376,
  294912,
  819200,
  884736, 1605632,
  2654208,
        4096000, 7962624,
  11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
        102400000, 214990848,
  512000000, 550731776, 644972544
  Writing inode tables: 
  1350/29328

Exit the Linux console and go back to VMware console, then still follow Accelops VA installation document to finish Accelops VA setup. Make sure you put "/dev/vg1/lg1" in the question about data mount point. The default one is "/dev/sdb".

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