MSDP File System

[nbuengr]

Hi,

We are configuring a media server with FC attached storage. Storage has 18TB capacity to be configured as MSDP. OS is RHEL 6.5 and can see the storage however we cannot mount it because we cannot format the 18TB volume as ext4 file system. I believe there's a limitation up to 16TB only. Is it okay to format the volume as XFS instead? Will it be ok to be an MSDP if file system is XFS?

Please explain what is the impact of the note below if we will be using XFS file system for MSDP.

Master and media server is RHEL 6.5

We will be installing NBU 7.7

Thanks.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Note the following in the SCL statement : " backup and restore ". This applies to backup and restore of clients with XFS filesystem where attributes have been changed with chattr. So, IMHO, this does not apply to MSDP filesystem.

[Nicolai]

EXT4 can go much larger than 16TB, please see link below 

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1532

16TB is the certified file system size, the actual file system limit is 1 exabyte.

I the link above there is a note  saying:

"To create filesystems greater than 8 TiB, you may have to invoke mkfs.ext3 with 4K blocks and the -F option:"

e.g

mkfs.ext3 -F -b 4096 /dev/BiggerGroup/biggervol

However I think you need to go even larger for 16TB file system size  e.g 8192. 

Try it out :)

[nbuengr]

We decided to go with XFS file system. Thanks for your insights!