Production server running from USB stilck with /var on HD ?

[Mateusz Marzantowicz]

On 10.07.2012 06:07, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> People,
>
> I have been using RH and Fedora since the beginning and love it!  I
> like to keep up with the latest version of Fedora on my production
> server and although the install of the OS itself from a LiveCD/USB is
> very fast, restoring all the other stuff takes quite a while.  To
> reduce downtime of the server, what I did last time was to install to
> a virtual machine which used a physical HD and then to reboot on the
> new HD when it was ready to go.  Now I am thinking of installing to a
> USB stick but having all the changeable files on /var (or anywhwere
> else) symlinked to a dir on the HD for speed.  What are the potential
> problems with this idea?

There are no potential problems when you install whole system to USB
stick or other flash card. You can then use your HD for data only.

There is one thing you should consider before doing what you asked for.
USB is slow! Slower then SAS or SATA. You would hardly see any
performance gains in boot up speed then. Additionally in "real" servers
a lot of time is spent on BIOS related procedures and with USB card you
must wait as well.

You should probably assemble a little cluster and then use kvm for
virtualization. It's very speed efficient to reboot virtual machines.


Mateusz Marzantowicz