Hi,
I'm starting to migrate from Windows Home Server v1 across to Mountain Lion Server and I'm not sure of the best way to set up partitions, RAID, etc.
Here's what I had with WHS:
- Time Machine backups of my desktop and laptop. These were not replicated as they're technically already a second copy and I'm short on space.
- Another non-replicated share for replaceable stuff such as DVD images.
- Replicated shares for important documents and similar non-replaceable data.
My OS X Server machine can take four internal drives but I'm not sure of the best ways to set these up. Unfortunately when compared to Snow Leopard Server's twenty-something different manuals, Mountain Lion Server's documentation seems to be very lacking. For example, with WHS it's obvious from the defaults that the intended partition structure is a 20 GB system volume, with the remainder of the first drive and all additional drives set as the storage pool. With ML Server, all I've been able to find so far is that the system volume should be at least 10 GB, but I don't know whether that's a recommendation or a restriction.
From what I've read so far, it doesn't seem to be possible to turn replication on and off at the share level like you can in WHS. Is that correct? Can I set up a mirrored volume for the critical data, and an additional "normal" volume for the replaceable stuff? Unfortunately that means that I'll need to predict how much of each type of data I'll have. Can I resize mirrored volumes without losing data?
Also, what's involved with upgrading an existing drive to a larger one? In WHS if I'm running low on space I can open up the storage manager, right-click the smallest drive, remove from pool, wait a few hours while it copies the data to the other drives, then swap it out for a bigger physical drive. It doesn't seem that this will be easy in OS X so should I be buying some big drives now while there's no data on there, or is it relatively easy to swap drives later?
Sorry for the barrage of questions but this is the first time that I've had to do something more complex than WHS' "add to storage pool"
I'm starting to migrate from Windows Home Server v1 across to Mountain Lion Server and I'm not sure of the best way to set up partitions, RAID, etc.
Here's what I had with WHS:
- Time Machine backups of my desktop and laptop. These were not replicated as they're technically already a second copy and I'm short on space.
- Another non-replicated share for replaceable stuff such as DVD images.
- Replicated shares for important documents and similar non-replaceable data.
My OS X Server machine can take four internal drives but I'm not sure of the best ways to set these up. Unfortunately when compared to Snow Leopard Server's twenty-something different manuals, Mountain Lion Server's documentation seems to be very lacking. For example, with WHS it's obvious from the defaults that the intended partition structure is a 20 GB system volume, with the remainder of the first drive and all additional drives set as the storage pool. With ML Server, all I've been able to find so far is that the system volume should be at least 10 GB, but I don't know whether that's a recommendation or a restriction.
From what I've read so far, it doesn't seem to be possible to turn replication on and off at the share level like you can in WHS. Is that correct? Can I set up a mirrored volume for the critical data, and an additional "normal" volume for the replaceable stuff? Unfortunately that means that I'll need to predict how much of each type of data I'll have. Can I resize mirrored volumes without losing data?
Also, what's involved with upgrading an existing drive to a larger one? In WHS if I'm running low on space I can open up the storage manager, right-click the smallest drive, remove from pool, wait a few hours while it copies the data to the other drives, then swap it out for a bigger physical drive. It doesn't seem that this will be easy in OS X so should I be buying some big drives now while there's no data on there, or is it relatively easy to swap drives later?
Sorry for the barrage of questions but this is the first time that I've had to do something more complex than WHS' "add to storage pool"