[Beowulf] Problem with Single RAID disk larger than 2TB and Linux

[Krugger]

Hi,

It usually takes some more time to get a stable storage with over 2 TB
partitions. In my personal experience we had to update the SAN
firmware, after that we figured out that the SCSI board that connected
to the SAN hardware also was bad and had to have it replaced. Also
remember to enable large block device support.

But after this the storage has been stable with over 2TB partitions.

Krugger


> You are right; luns over 2TB are not any more risky than luns under 2TB. If they
> work "out of the box" on your particular setup, great.
>
> However, if they don't work then you are into a world of pain working out
> whether it is your storage controller, SAN fabric, HBA, multipath
> implementation, kernel, partition table or filesystem which is broken.
>
> It gets especially bad in SAN environments where you have multiple
> kernel/storage combinations. Keeping luns < 2TB means that there is a reasonable
> expectation that things will keep on working when you change the storage
> presentation.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Guy