[BlueOnyx:18635] Re: Tips for large disk installation

[Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet]

Hi All,

Just settling back into the office after a bit of time off and have been 
revisiting this.

I have tried some different options, and encountered plenty of failure. 
  See below?

On 11/6/2015 5:46 PM, Michael Stauber wrote:
>> We are setting up a customer with a BlueOnyx server with 10TB of disk.
>
> I'd suggest to go with 5209R instead of 5208R. There is a better chance
> that it'll work. The Anaconda (and also Grub for that matter) on EL6 are
> perhaps not yet up to speed to handle disks and partitions of that size.

Right, on your suggestion, I've gone ahead with 5209R.   On a physical 
system with the array attached, we didn't even get out of the gate. 
Before the slick installation GUI would appear, the server would load X 
and then get permanently hung on a black screen with the wrist-watch 
"wait" icon.   That would last for hours.  Or days, actually.   Various 
permutations of the install process would invariably result in the same 
failure.

The best success is when I set up a VPS under VMware with a modest 160GB 
drive and installed 5209R, then used VMware to inflate the virtual disk, 
then inflated the LVM to fill the remaining drive space, somewhat as 
Michael suggested.

> Once everything is up and you have done the initial setup, "blow" the
> /home partition up to maximum size. That should work either way.

Yeah, well that process takes a bit of running around, actually.  You 
can't just say "oh, get big!"   You have to expand the LVM.  To do that 
you have to first add another partition to then join into the VG, then 
add that partition to the appropriate LVM.  Trouble is, the BlueOnyx 
installer sets things up in MBR, which as we know is pretty useless when 
it comes to building a 10TB volume.

The solution is to convert to GPT, and there's a nifty tool to do that 
called gdisk (works like fdisk) that will convert the disk.   Worked 
like a champ.   Got everything set exactly as intended, performed a YUM 
update, went through the BlueOnyx initial config via GUI, and then sent 
the system for a reboot.   And that's where it died.

So now I have a useless VM with a giant disk.  I figured I'd see if the 
installer failed in a similar manner with the VMware installation 
keeping the giant disk.   It surprised me and moved on through the 
entire process, formatting the 10TB disk in about 40 seconds and 
installed all packages.

However, it failed in the end installing the boot loader.   The error 
box pops up and says:
An unknown error has occurred
This program has encountered an unknown error. You may report the bug 
below or quit the program.

Oh so helpful.

Moving on in the More info, I found reference to this:
anaconda 19.31.123-1 exception report
Traceback (most recent call first):
	File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/pyanaconda/bootloader.py", 
line 1594, in install raise BootLoaderError("boot loader install failed")
	File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/pyanaconda/bootloader.py", 
line 1609, in write self.install()

And it sort of goes on and on.   I'll copy the entire thing if need be, 
but there's no copy/paste, so that's why I stop.

I think the gist is there's an issue with the GPT disk and writing the 
bootloader.   I'm not sure how to get around it.

Is BlueOnyx just not set up for such a large volume?   On the one hand, 
disks are not going to be getting any smaller.  On the other hand, I 
don't want to waste my time beating a dead horse if I'm just trying to 
make BlueOnyx do something it doesn't want to do.

-- 
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
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