Bare Metal & Storage

Dedicated servers, RAID, IPMI, LVM, NAS/NFS and large-scale storage

• Bare Metal vs VPS: When to Go Dedicated

  Weigh dedicated servers against VPS across cost, performance, and operations so you pick the right foundation for your stage.

• Choosing RAID for a Bare-Metal Server: RAID 0 vs 1 vs 5 vs 10

  A practical breakdown of the four common RAID levels across redundancy, performance, and capacity, with picks by workload.

• IPMI / Out-of-Band Management: Remote Power, OS Install, and KVM

  Use the OS-independent IPMI/BMC to power-cycle, inspect hardware, and reinstall from a virtual CD — all remotely.

• Hardware RAID Cards and Disk Array Monitoring

  Understand the RAID card and disk array on your bare-metal server, and learn to catch dropped disks and degraded arrays with storcli / mdadm before it's too late.

• Planning Large-Capacity Storage: Partitions, Filesystems, and Growth

  From partition tables to filesystem choice, alignment, mounting, and online resizing — how to lay out big disks so they stay stable and keep room to grow.

• LVM Logical Volume Management: Create, Grow, and Snapshot

  Manage disks with the PV/VG/LV model to resize volumes live and snapshot for backups — far more flexible than plain partitions.

• Setting Up and Mounting NFS Network Storage

  Share one server's directory across many machines and read/write it like a local disk — with the private-network security settings you must not skip.

• NIC Bonding and Multiple Network Ports

  Combine a bare-metal server's multiple NICs into one logical interface for higher bandwidth or stronger redundancy.

• Hardware Health Monitoring: Temperature, SMART, and Disk Lifespan

  Use smartctl, sensors, and nvme to routinely inspect disk health and temperatures on a physical server—catch failing drives before they take your data.

• Installing an OS on a Physical Server: IPMI ISO Mounting and PXE

  Understand the two mainstream ways to install an OS on a dedicated server—remote ISO mounting over IPMI and PXE network boot—plus the first steps after install.