Back in 2024 I moved most of my services from a bare metal server in a data center of one provider to a bare metal server in a data center of another provider. In my case, the data center I migrated to was Scaleway and like pretty much everyone else, their bare metal servers are configured by default with two drives and a RAID for redundancy. As I required more storage then the RAID could provide, I removed the RAID configuration after I installed Ubuntu as the host operating system. You can find the somewhat complicated details here. But it turns out there is actually a much simpler way: A custom partitioning config file!
As shown in the screenshot above, Scaleway has an option to provide a custom partitioning json config file for a bare metal servers After a bit of tweaking, I got a valid json file that would create 4 partitions on ‘sda’, three of them for the system and the last and empty one as free space for the ZFS pool I want to use for my virtual machine images and data. In addition, a single empty partition is created on ‘sdb’ that I can also use for the ZFS pool. Much easier then to get rid of the RAID as I previously did.
As the example in the Scaleway documentation did not lead me to the configuration I wanted to have, here’s my config file in case you are looking for something similar:
{
"disks": [
{
"device": "/dev/sda",
"partitions": [
{
"label": "legacy",
"number": 1,
"size": 536870912
},
{
"label": "boot",
"number": 2,
"size": 536870912
},
{
"label": "root",
"number": 3,
"size": 64424509440
},
{
"label": "data",
"number": 4,
"useAllAvailableSpace": true
}
]
},
{
"device": "/dev/sdb",
"partitions": [
{
"label": "data",
"number": 1,
"useAllAvailableSpace": true
}
]
}
],
"filesystems": [
{
"device": "/dev/sda2",
"format": "ext4",
"mountpoint": "/boot"
},
{
"device": "/dev/sda3",
"format": "ext4",
"mountpoint": "/"
}
],
"raids": [],
"zfs": {
"pools": []
},
"lvm": null
}