guidelines for max volume sizes

[Michael Pelletier]

On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, Kelsang Wangden wrote:

> I read in the AFS 3.6 release notes that the maximum volume size for 3.5
> (what are servers are running right now) is 2 Gig, and in 3.6 it's 8
> Gig.  Are there any other guidelines that I should give them regarding
> volume size? 

What I heard in the class is that this is the maximum RECOMMENDED and
SUPPORTED volume size, not the physical maximum for the software.  This
probably came about back when 32-bit OS's couldn't handle filesystems
larger than 2GB.  The thing to keep in mind, though, is that larger
volumes are more unweildy to manage - if you want to move it, you have to
find a big enough landing space for it somewhere else.  And it's easy
enough to create a variety of volumes of reasonable size and mount them
underneath one another, provided that you don't wind up with individual
files larger than the volume size you choose.  For instance, we've got an
11GB filesystem that holds a particular software package - we can break it
up into tools.appname.bin, tools.appname.config, and tools.appname for
everything else to fit under an 8GB volume size. 

	-Michael Pelletier.