AMI (RHEL7.0) and XFS root partition (These disks do not have 'ext3' or 'ext4' filesystems)

skeswani

 

When attempting to build out a new cluster using the updated AMI for 7.1.2 on Redhat 7, you may get the following errors

 

1.
WARN (S0160): https://my.vertica.com/docs/7.1.x/HTML/index.htm#cshid=S0160
These disks do not have 'ext3' or 'ext4' filesystems: '/dev/xvda2' =
'xfs'

 

2.
FAIL (S0310): https://my.vertica.com/docs/7.1.x/HTML/index.htm#cshid=S0310
Transparent hugepages is set to 'always'. Must be 'never' or 'madvise'.

 

For #1

This AMI has a base OS of RHEL 7.0 (previously CentOS 6.5.).
The default partition format for RHEL 7.0 is XFS. Hence the root partition/volumes are XFS. XFS is not really ideal (or supported) for Vertica.

 

We usually do not expect users to put data in the root partition/volume.

 

For most database products, including Vertica the convention is to mount additional volumes and put the database on those volumes.  This has many benefits related to performance, upgrades and backups etc.

 

Page 12, bullet #9 of our AMI/AWS documentation does mentions that you need to add volumes to the AMI
( http://my.vertica.com/docs/Ecosystem/Amazon/HP_Vertica_7.1.x_Vertica_AWS.pdf )

Quote from Document:
"Add storage to your instances based on your needs. Hewlett Packard recommends that you add a number of drives equal to the number of cores in your instance. For example, for a c3.8xlarge, add eight drives. For an r3.4xlarge, add four drives. For optimal performance with EBS volumes, Amazon recommends that you configure them in a RAID 0 array on each node in your cluster."

 

There is further information on howto setup the volumes for best performance.

 

After you mount this additional volumes/storage and format it as ext4, provide the mount point as a option to the installer (e.g. --data-dir /vertica/data.).

You will no longer get this error and the install will succeed.

 

 

#2
To bypass the message about Transparent Huge Pages follow the instructions here.
This is generically true of all instances.

https://my.vertica.com/docs/7.1.x/HTML/index.htm#cshid=S0310

 

To understand what exactly needs to be done to configure you can also look at the script at "/opt/vertica/sbin/configure_aws_software_raid.sh" as a reference on how to configure the data volumes.

 

 

thanks

- Sumeet

sarafumes

Thanks Sumeet, Your resolution really helped me to fix my errors.