EXT4/LVM recommendations for 3TB of mdbox ?

[Nicolas C.]

Hello,

Do you have recommendations on EXT4 and LVM options for a 3TB 
file-system for mdbox?

We currently use the mbox format on a XFS with poor performances since 
the update in v2.1 (Debian).

We will switch to EXT4 to have the possibility of shrinking the 
file-system if needed (which is not possible with XFS), we currently 
have LVM partitions but with mdbox we will use LVM snapshots to backup 
the server in a consistent state.

So,

  - any particular options to use with mkfs.ext4 for the creation of the 
FS ?

  - do you recommend a «thin» logical volume ? Our storage (IBM Storwize 
v7000) already have thin provisioning capabilities.

The server will be a VMware virtual machine running Debian with RDM LUNs 
of 500GB. Data blocks will be automatically spread across several RAID 
disk (SSD, SAS, SATA) by the v7000. The «mdbox_rotate_size» will be 
configured around 10MB.

Thanks,

Nicolas C.