User's Manual

4 Installing 7signal Sapphire 7
7signal Ltd, Panuntie 6, FI-00620 HELSINKI, FINLAND, [phone], [e-mail], www.7signal.com
7signal Sapphire Deployment Guide Release 3.1
4 INSTALLING 7SIGNAL SAPPHIRE
4.1 Operating System installation tips
It is recommended to install the operating system by using the graphical installer.
4.1.1 Hard disk partitioning
This chapter gives some guidelines for hard disk partitioning. It is assumed that readers have
comprehensive knowledge about Linux file systems, RAID, LVM and disk partitioning. This
chapter does not cover basic partitioning requirements, e.g. configuring boot and swap
partitions are not covered.
Laptop installations
Default partitioning suggested by the OS installer is suitable for most of the cases. As laptops
are rarely equipped with multiple hard drives, RAID configurations are not possible.
Server installations
It is recommended to configure at least one RAID array: 7signal databases and database log
files should reside on a file system on top of RAIDed disks (RAID level 1 or higher, LVM on top
of RAID). Multiple RAIDed file systems are also suitable, for example, OS installation could be
on file system on RAID1, and databases on file system on top of RAID5.
It is suggested that LVM is used on top of RAIDs: this makes possible to easily add a new RAID
array as a LVM physical volume, if the existing ones run out of disk space.
Example #1
 Two physical disks
 Boot and swap partitions
 RAID1 on top of disks, formatted as LVM physical volume
 Physical volume split into two logical volumes
o 20% of space for OS installation, mount point “/” (LV1)
o 80% of space for databases and database log files, mount point
/opt/7signal/databases (LV2)
 Sapphire installation
o Sapphire components are installed to /opt/7signal (on LV1)
o Sapphire databases are installed to /opt/7signal/databases (on LV2)
(7signal DBMS installer asks for location of databases and database log files)
Example #2
 Five physical disks
 Boot and swap partitions
 RAID1 on top of two disk, RAID5 on top of tree disks, all formatted as LVM physical
volume
 Physical volume on RAID1 has one logical volume