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Description of problem: There is a variety of bits and pieces of information about configuring RHEL with enterprise storage. I feel it would be of value to provide a section to summarize the location of these particular details. I am not entirely sure about this, since the SAG is organized around components of RHEL, and so a section on "things to note when using enterprise storage" does not really fit as far as a particular section. It might fit as an Appendix though. And I would guess of all our documentation, a customer who is setting up an enterprise storage array to be connected to RHEL would most likely look for clues in the SAG above all other RHEL documentation. Here is some possible content: 0. Start with an admonition to contact the storage vendor for specific configuration information. Then go on to list the following areas that are worth consideration when configuring enterprise storage. 1. tuned-adm "enterprise-storage" profile. This is part of the power management guide. NOTE: The power management guide does not mention this profile, but I spoke with Jeff Moyer about it. 2. Turning off barriers. If using filesystems such as the default of ext4, barriers should be turned off with the "-o nobarrier" mount option. http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/writebarrieronoff.html 3. Block discard. Described in SSD section, and mentioned in release notes as a use for thinly provisioned LUNs. Would need to check with storage vendor whether it is supported. http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Release_Notes/filesystems.html#id1776795 http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/newmds-ssdtuning.html#ssddeploy 4. I/O Alignment. http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/newstorage-iolimits.html 5. Multipathing. Might be worth a mention of our DM Multipath Configuration and Administration document.
Should this perhaps go either in Chapter 1: Overview, or Chapter 2 Storage Considerations? Also, for points 2, 3, and 4, what did you want taken out of there? If it's already documented in the Storage Admin guide I don't really see the point in replicating it or just having a couple sentences and a link when all the client needs to do is look down the contents page to find these sections.
Let me send a note to our SBR storage mailing lists to see if this is something others see as valuable. I'm not sure I can drive this content or be the SME for it. If it is important we may need to identify a specific SME.
I could see this fitting fairly naturally in the overview section - since most of this is covered _somewhere_ (even if we also want to increase coverage in some of those places), a couple of pages at the front of the document "Overview of enterprise storage technology" mentioning the issues highlighted here and providing links for futher information (and also maybe mentioning the knowledge base?) might serve as a good introduction that would make this easy to find without messing too much with the existing document structure.