Using quotas/lvm's to isolate application disk usage

[Kenneth Holter]

Hi.


We've got a bunch of servers running different third party applications.
Currently there are little or no control with regards to which file systems
the applications are install on and which file systems contains the dynamic
files such as log files and dump files. Some applications have separate data
file systems, while others write to the same file system that contains the
binaries. With this kind of setup, one single application can cause serious
trouble for all the other applications, when the application fills up the
shared file systems.

What I'd like to do is force all the different application admins to
configure their apps to install the binaries in for example /opt, and make
sure that all logs and such are placed in /var. For /var I'm thinking each
app will have its own folder, maybe also placed on separete mount
points (logical volumes). Alternativly, I could set up quotas on /var, or
even a combination of LVMs and quotas (so that the app admins are notified
when the file system is more or less full, but not quite).

Is there any best practice documents on this subject? I'd really appreciate
some input on how to go about increasing the isolation between the different
app (with regards to disk usage).


Regards,
Kenneth Holter