DESCRIBING THE STRATIS ARCHITECTURE

• The current local storage solution in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
includes many stable and mature technologies, including the device
mapper (dm), the logical volume manager (LVM) and the XFS file system.

• Features provided by these components include massively scalable file

systems, snapshots, redundant (RAID) logical devices, multipathing, thin
provisioning, caching, deduplication, and support for virtual machines
and containers.

• Each storage stack layer (dm, LVM, and XFS) is managed using layer-
specific commands and utilities, requiring that system administrators
manage physical devices, fixed-size volumes, and file systems as
separate storage components.
• A new generation of storage management solutions appeared in recent years,
referred to as volume-managing file systems, that dynamically and transparently
manage the volume layer as file systems are created and sized.
• However, although the community development of these file systems was
ongoing for years, none reached the level of feature support and stability
required to become the primary local storage for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• With RHEL 8, Red Hat introduces the Stratis storage management solution.
• Instead of developing from scratch, as other storage projects attempted, Stratis
works with existing RHEL storage components.
• Stratis runs as a service that manages pools of physical storage devices, and
transparently creates and manages volumes for the file systems being created.
• Because Stratis uses existing storage drivers and tools, all of the advanced
storage features that you currently use in LVM, XFS, and the device mapper are
also supported by Stratis.
• In a volume-managed file system, file systems are built inside shared
pools of disk devices using a concept known as thin provisioning.
• Stratis file systems do not have fixed sizes and no longer preallocate
unused block space. Although the file system is still built on a hidden
LVM volume, Stratis manages the underlying volume for you and can
expand it when needed.
• The in-use size of a file system is seen as the amount of actual blocks
in use by contained files. The space available to a file system is the
amount of space still unused in the pooled devices on which it
resides.
• Multiple file systems can reside in the same pool of disk devices,
sharing the available space, but file systems can also reserve pool
space to guarantee availability when needed.
• Stratis uses stored metadata to recognize managed pools, volumes,
and file systems. Therefore, file systems created by Stratis should
never be reformatted or reconfigured manually; they should only be
managed using Stratis tools and commands.
• Manually configuring Stratis file systems could cause the loss of that
metadata and prevent Stratis from recognizing the file systems it has
created.

• You can create multiple pools with different sets of block devices.
From each pool, you can create one or more file systems.
• Currently, you can create up to 2^24 file systems per pool.
The following diagram illustrates how the elements of the Stratis
storage management solution are positioned.
COMPRESSING AND DEDUPLICATING
STORAGE WITH VDO