D.1.8. How Many Partitions?
At this point in the process of preparing to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you must give some consideration to the number and size of the partitions to be used by your new operating system. The question of "how many partitions" continues to spark debate within the Linux community and, without any end to the debate in sight, it is safe to say that there are probably as many partition layouts as there are people debating the issue.
Keeping this in mind, we recommend that, unless you have a reason for doing otherwise, you should at least create the following partitions: swap, /boot/,and / (root).
For more information, refer to Section 4.8.4, “Recommended Partitioning Scheme”.