RHEL 7 manual partition or not

Latest response

We are moving from rhel 6 to 7 and going from a physical to a virtual server. In the past we have always used custom partitioning. Is there a reason to auto partition during install, or is it best to always use custom partitioning. Just wanted an idea of what others are doing and for what reasons.

Responses

As with most things, it depends. It appears that the automatic partitioning will only create a limited set of items: /, swap, /boot, /home (depending on size of disk). According to the RHEL7 installation guide the dedicated home partition will only be created if the install disk is at least 50GiB. It also appears to only allot 50GiB for '/' and the rest to swap and '/home'. All partitions outside of /boot are placed in a logical volume. From this I have a couple thoughts: 1) If your system layout will be predictably static you might consider doing without LVM since it provides some overhead (albeit minimal). 2) I think having a dedicated /var or /var/log partition so as to prevent your system from crashing if logs fill the system. 3) Though I don't have a technical basis for this I prefer to have my swap space on a dedicated disk (not LVM). 4) If you plan on having shared/mounted home directories you may not need all of the space that the automatic partitioning gives to that partition.

Hi Derrick,

When it comes to system installations, I strongly recommend to prepare the disks and partitions before installing anything.
This also means that performing a manually customized installation of all operating systems is absolutely recommended.
Using the automatic installation option is intended to be something for new and not so experienced users in my opinion.

Thank you for your responses. I have been testing both manual partitioning and auto installation. Most likely we will be going with custom partitioning again.

Personally I prefer custom partioning as it gives you more control.

Close

Welcome! Check out the Getting Started with Red Hat page for quick tours and guides for common tasks.