Technology Insights

Using RAID On Z68 Motherboard: Asus Z68 Extreme4 Gen3

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I recently got a new desktop computer that has a Asus Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 motherboard in it and wanted to configure RAID 0 on a couple terabyte hard drives to provide better performance and more space to my primary volume. Initially I didn’t see how to configure the RAID as I am used to an external hardware RAID card that has its own BIOS. After a little bit of poking I was able to locate the setting to enable RAID and then configuring it was fairly standard. Below I describe the setting to enable RAID on the Z69 Extreme4 Gen3 mobo and how to configure a new RAID 0 volume once RAID is enabled.

Technology Insights

Dell Linux OpenManage Command To Watch RAID Group Rebuild

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The Dell OpenManage Linux packages have come a long way and are very useful to have installed on any Dell servers you have installed. In fact OpenManage could be considered critical to monitoring Dell hardware for many reasons but consider a single disk in a RAID 1 mirrored group failing and you don’t have physical access to the box. Unless you are constantly monitoring other logs it would make things much easier to receive an alert from monitoring software such as something like Nagios. This way you can feel comfortable at all times that your Dell hardware is in top shape.

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Expand A Partition That Is Part Of A Logical Volume Group While Server Is Running

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I recently had a couple new CentOS Linux servers brought online at a colo that a company I work for uses. I had the colo do a very simple install of CentOS so I could handle the details without having to remove a bunch of packages we didn’t need. The servers have two one terabyte drives installed in a RAID 1 configuration which provides us with one terabyte of usable disk space and upon initial configuration had a logical volume group created with three logical volumes. Each of the logical volumes, which included /var, /usr, and /, only had two gigabytes of space so I needed to first expand those logical volumes and later will be creating a large logical volume used for database data. Below I describe expanding already existing logical volumes when there is room to grow in the logical volume group.