guidelines for max volume sizes

[Schuster, Paul]

Micheal,

Whether or not larger volumes are unweidly to manage is factor of the size
of your infrastructure. In our environment, we have multiple 0.5TB servers 
on a gigabit network. For us larger volumes improve manageability.

One of the features we would like to see in AFS which would greatly 
enhance the manageability of volumes is the capability to merge or split 
existing volumes on directories. For example if A/B/C is a directory 
structure in volume Z, I could issue some vos command to split everything
below directory B to a new volume Y, and change directory B in volume Z
to be a mountpoint Y. Similar approach to merging two volumes.

 - Paul Schuster

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Pelletier [mailto:mike@alteon.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 2:42 AM
To: Kelsang Wangden
Cc: info-afs@transarc.com; afs-info@openafs.org
Subject: Re: guidelines for max volume sizes


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.