Stratis how-to/walk-through

2018-11-27

Introduction

Stratis provides ZFS/Btrfs-style features by integrating layers of existing technology: Linux’s devicemapper subsystem, and the XFS filesystem. The stratisd daemon manages collections of block devices, and provides a D-Bus API. The stratis-cli provides a command-line tool stratis which itself uses the D-Bus API to communicate with stratisd.

Installation

# dnf install stratisd stratis-cli

Starting the service

# systemctl start stratisd

# systemctl enable stratisd
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/sysinit.target.wants/stratisd.service →
/usr/lib/systemd/system/stratisd.service.

Locate an empty block device

Use utilities like lsblk and blkid to find a block device to use with Stratis.

# lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   28G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0    1G  0 part /boot
├─sda2   8:2    0  2.8G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda3   8:3    0   15G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0    1T  0 disk
sdc      8:32   0    2T  0 disk
sdd      8:48   0    8G  0 disk
sde      8:64   0    8G  0 disk
sdf      8:80   0    8G  0 disk
sr0     11:0    1 1024M  0 rom

# blkid -p /dev/sda
/dev/sda: PTUUID="b7168b63" PTTYPE="dos"

Not empty, it contains a partition table.

# blkid -p /dev/sdb
Empty, no known signatures found.

If you are positive that you have a block device that you want to use and it has a signature on it, you need to clear the signature before using it in a Stratis pool. Otherwise you will get an error when you attempt to create the pool.

To clear a device so that it can be used by Stratis.

# blkid -p /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc: UUID="770587cc-cfd3-44cb-82e2-756902cf458b" VERSION="1.0" TYPE="ext4" USAGE="filesystem"

# wipefs -a /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc: 2 bytes were erased at offset 0x00000438 (ext4): 53 ef

Creating a pool

A pool with one block device.

# stratis pool create stratis_howto /dev/sdb

# stratis pool list
Name             Total Physical Size  Total Physical Used
stratis_howto                  1 TiB               52 MiB

A pool with 2 block devices (no redundancy).

# stratis pool create tale_of_2_disks /dev/sdd /dev/sdf

# stratis pool list
Name               Total Physical Size  Total Physical Used
stratis_howto                    1 TiB               52 MiB
tale_of_2_disks                 16 GiB               56 MiB

Creating a filesystem from the pool

# stratis filesystem create stratis_howto fs_howto

# stratis filesystem list
Pool Name      Name      Used     Created            Device
stratis_howto  fs_howto  546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:08  /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto

To create another file system, just repeat the same command with a different file system name. The file system names are required to be unique in a pool.

# stratis filesystem create stratis_howto my_precious

# stratis filesystem list
Pool Name      Name         Used     Created            Device
stratis_howto  fs_howto     546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:08  /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto
stratis_howto  my_precious  546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:09  /stratis/stratis_howto/my_precious

The file system is created on a thinly provisioned 1 TB block device. Stratis will take care of allocating blocks from the pool and re-sizing the XFS file system as needed during its lifetime.

You can also constrain the file system list output by including the pool name.

# stratis pool create olympic /dev/sdc

# stratis filesystem create olympic backstroke

# stratis filesystem
Pool Name      Name         Used     Created            Device
olympic        backstroke   546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:10  /stratis/olympic/backstroke
stratis_howto  fs_howto     546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:08  /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto
stratis_howto  my_precious  546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:09  /stratis/stratis_howto/my_precious

# stratis filesystem list stratis_howto
Pool Name      Name         Used     Created            Device
stratis_howto  fs_howto     546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:08  /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto
stratis_howto  my_precious  546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:09  /stratis/stratis_howto/my_precious

Mount the file system

# mount /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto /mnt

Add mount point to `/etc/fstab` using file system UUID

You can use /stratis/<pool name>/<file system name> but each time you rename a pool or file system you will need to update /etc/fstab, thus using file system UUID is recommended.

# blkid -p /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto
/stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto: UUID="a38780e5-04e3-49da-8b95-2575d77e947c" TYPE="xfs" USAGE="filesystem"

# echo "UUID=a38780e5-04e3-49da-8b95-2575d77e947c /mnt xfs defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

Other useful pool operations

`add-data`: Add a disk to an existing pool

# stratis pool add-data tale_of_2_disks /dev/sdc

# stratis pool list
Name               Total Physical Size  Total Physical Used
stratis_howto                    1 TiB               52 MiB
tale_of_2_disks               2.02 TiB               60 MiB

`rename`: Rename a pool

# stratis pool rename tale_of_2_disks 3_amigos

# stratis pool list
Name             Total Physical Size  Total Physical Used
3_amigos                    2.02 TiB               60 MiB
stratis_howto                  1 TiB               52 MiB

`add-cache`: Add a block device as a cache device (typically something like SSD)

# stratis pool add-cache 3_amigos /dev/sde

`destroy`: Destroy a pool, no file systems can exist in pool

# stratis pool destroy 3_amigos

# stratis pool list
Name             Total Physical Size  Total Physical Used
stratis_howto                  1 TiB               52 MiB

Other useful file system operations

`destroy`: Remove a Stratis provided filesystem

To remove a Stratis provided filesystem, make sure that it’s not in use, and then destroy it.

# stratis filesystem list
Pool Name      Name         Used     Created            Device
olympic        backstroke   546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:10  /stratis/olympic/backstroke
stratis_howto  fs_howto     546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:08  /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto
stratis_howto  my_precious  546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:09  /stratis/stratis_howto/my_precious

# stratis filesystem destroy stratis_howto my_precious

# stratis filesystem list
Pool Name      Name        Used     Created            Device
olympic        backstroke  546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:10  /stratis/olympic/backstroke
stratis_howto  fs_howto    546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:08  /stratis/stratis_howto/fs_howto

`rename`: Rename a file system

# stratis filesystem rename olympic backstroke some_fs

`snapshot`: Create a snapshot

To create a snaphot, which is a read/writeable thinly provisioned point in time copy of the source FS.

# stratis filesystem snapshot olympic some_fs some_fs_snapshot

# stratis filesystem list olympic
Pool Name  Name              Used     Created            Device
olympic    some_fs           546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:10  /stratis/olympic/some_fs
olympic    some_fs_snapshot  546 MiB  Nov 09 2018 11:26  /stratis/olympic/some_fs_snapshot

Misc. operations

Query which block devices belong to a pool or all of Stratis.

# stratis blockdev list olympic
Pool Name  Device Node    Physical Size   State  Tier
olympic    /dev/sdc            2.00 TiB  In-use  Data

# stratis blockdev list
Pool Name      Device Node    Physical Size   State  Tier
olympic        /dev/sdc            2.00 TiB  In-use  Data
stratis_howto  /dev/sdb               1 TiB  In-use  Data

Query redundancies that Stratis supports.

# stratis daemon redundancy
NONE: 0

Query the Stratis daemon (stratisd) version.

# stratis daemon version
1.0.1

Stratis how-to/walk-through

Contents

Introduction

Installation

Starting the service

Locate an empty block device

Creating a pool

Creating a filesystem from the pool

Mount the file system

Add mount point to /etc/fstab using file system UUID

Other useful pool operations

add-data: Add a disk to an existing pool

rename: Rename a pool

add-cache: Add a block device as a cache device (typically something like SSD)

destroy: Destroy a pool, no file systems can exist in pool