HP Insight Control Software for Linux - Manual (Page 115)

10.6 Insight Control for Linux partition wizard overview
The Insight Control for Linux Partition Wizard is a generic hybrid of the Red Hat and Novell Partition
Wizards. The Partition Wizard does not have logic to examine the managed systems on which it
is used, thus you must have prior knowledge of the storage hardware.
The Partition Wizard enables you to capture an image with one partition scheme and then to
deploy the image to one or more managed systems with a more customized partition scheme. An
example of this might be a default installation where the file system was installed with a / (root)
and swap partition. You could capture this image and later deploy it to multiple servers as /, swap,
/opt
, /usr , and /var without having to manually manipulate the image.
The Partition Wizard user interface provides a representation of the disk partition layout to be
applied to the target server before laying down the image. Because the Partition Wizard does not
know about the storage media, it works with a generic representation that was created to describe
the storage media.
The Partition Wizard is designed to work with the ext3, ReiserFS, Swap, and LVM file system types.
10.6.1 Partition wizard requirements and guidelines
If you use the Partition Wizard to specify a customized disk layout, be aware of the following
requirements:
•
The /boot directory or partition (depending on how the source managed system was installed)
should remain in the same relative location in the deployed image.
In SLES, the default is to place the entire root (/) partition as the second partition (partition 1)
on the drive (this includes the /boot directory.)
In RHEL, the default is to create a partition with a mount point of /boot as the first partition
(partition 0) on the drive, and a separate root (/) partition in an LVM elsewhere.
In both of these examples, when you deploy the captured image, you must ensure that the
/boot
directory or partition remains in the same numbered partition. You are free to resize
these as required, however, do not change their location.
•
RHEL places the root partition in a logical volume group named VolGroup00 by default. If
you use the Partition Wizard to build a custom partitioning layout and choose to place the
root partition in a logical volume group (LVM), you must place it into a logical volume group
named VolGroup00. Do not rename this LVM. If you used a custom Kickstart installation
configuration file to install the initial system, and you specified a different default logical
volume group name, you must use the same name in the Partition Wizard.
•
The mechanism used to capture a Linux image (the tar command) preserves any hard links
that exist within your file system. When you deploy an image and use the Partition Wizard
to create a complex disk layout (for example, including separate /, /boot, /usr, and /var
file systems), you might experience difficulties as the image extraction attempts to re-create
the captured hard links that cross file systems.
Should this occur, the deployment fails. If you plan to use separate partitions, before capturing
the image, replace any hard links with symbolic links. This is particularly an issue with SLES
because it specifically uses a hard link to link a file in /etc and /usr/share, potentially
crossing file system boundaries.
•
If you plan to deploy an image using different file system types than were originally used to
install the source managed system, you must ensure that support for the new file system is built
into the OS (kernel module, and file system tools packages) before capturing the image.
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