Physical Partitions

Each disk declared may be partitioned, i.e. the act of dividing the physical disk into logical sections with the goal to treat one physical disk drive as if it were multiple disks. These are called physical partitions.

Note

A disk may have a maximum of 4 physical partitions.

Each physical partition has a unique number (1,2,3 and 4) and declare a filesystem type and size. All filesystem types with the exception of lvm2, extended and linux-swap require a mount point. LVM physical partitions are used in logical volumes (which will be covered later).

Example

The following example shows 3 physical partitions of a disk: /boot, swap, and /space.

../../../_images/partitioning-ex1.png
---
partitioning:
  disks:
  - name: sda
        type: msdos
        size: 20480
        partitions:
        - number: 1
          fstype: ext3
          size: 2048
          mountPoint: "/boot"
        - number: 2
          fstype: linux-swap
          size: 1024
        - number: 3
          fstype: ext3
          size: 17408
          label: space
          mountPoint: "/space"

If you are using JSON:

{
        "partitioning": {
            "disks": [
              {
                "name": "sda",
                "type": "msdos",
                "size": 20480,
                "partitions": [
                  {
                    "number": 1,
                    "fstype": "ext3",
                    "size": 2048,
                    "mountPoint": "/boot"
                  },
                  {
                    "number": 2,
                    "fstype": "linux-swap",
                    "size": 1024
                  },
                  {
                    "number": 3,
                    "fstype": "ext3",
                    "size": 17408,
                    "label": "space",
                    "mountPoint": "/space"
                  }
                ]
              }
            ]
        }
}

Note

In a partitioning table, at least one partition must be the /boot partition. In the above example this is one of the physical partitions. Furthermore, the sum of the physical partition sizes must be smaller or equal to the disk size.