Chapter 2 Disk Space Planning

Before installing the Solaris 8 software, you can determine if your system has enough disk space by doing some high-level planning. If you take time to plan, you'll be able to add more disks to your system, if you need them, before you start to install Solaris 8 software.

Guidelines

Planning disk space is different for everyone; however, here are some general points to consider:

• Allocate additional disk space for each language selected (for example, Chinese, Japanese, Korean).

• Allocate additional disk space in the /var file system if you intend to support printing or mail.

• Allocate additional disk space in the /var file system if you intend to use the crash dump feature (savecore(1M)).

• Allocate additional disk space on a server if it's going to provide home directory file systems for users on other systems (by default, home directories are usually located in the /export file system).

• Allocate enough swap space. Table 6-5 contains additional information about how much swap space you need to allocate on a system.

• Allocate space for the Solaris software group you want to install. "Disk Space Recommendations for Software Groups" contains the recommended disk space for the software groups. When planning disk space, remember that the Solaris 8 Interactive Installation Program enables you to add or remove individual software packages from the software group that you select.

• Create a minimum number of file systems. By default, the Solaris 8 Interactive Installation Program creates only root (/), /usr, and /swap (/export is also created when space is allocated for OS services). Creating a minimum number of file systems helps with future upgrades and file system expansion because separate file systems are limited by their slice boundaries.

• Allocate additional disk space for additional or third-party software.

Disk Space Recommendations for Software Groups

The following table lists the Solaris software groups and the recommended amount of disk space for each group.

Table 2-1 Disk Space Recommendations

Software Group	Recommended Disk Space
Entire Distribution Plus OEM Support	2.4 Gbytes
Entire Distribution	2.3 Gbytes
Developer System Support	1.9 Gbytes
End User System Support	1.6 Gbytes

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Note -

Swap space is included in the disk space recommendations.

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