What kind of "volume/storage management" has the largest support/feature set these days? [closed]
Solution 1:
I'm primarily using ZFS on Linux for my production storage needs, in several forms.
I use RHEL/CentOS-like systems for the most part, and spent a decade equipping servers with XFS as the main filesytem. In November 2012, there was a change to the XFS shipped in the Red Hat kernel that made new XFS installations unsuitable for my needs. That was around the same time that the ZFS on Linux project improved its delivery/installation process..
I took a leap of faith and used the availability of native Linux ZFS as an opportunity to run it under production workloads. I'm approaching a year in this setup and have been completely happy with the decision. I have ~40 Linux server in varying capacities that use ZFS data volumes.
The main benefits...
- Compression.
- L2ARC read caching has helped accelerate some of my applications. The ZFS caching mechanism is far more intelligent than the Linux VM subsystem.
- ZFS is a slicker volume manager than LVM and offers more flexibility.
- The data integrity can't be beat...
- I've done many stupid things with ZFS and still haven't managed to lose data...
A few downsides...
- I have a few esoteric ZFS configurations that required digging into the source code or relying on the developer community to fully understand/optimize. Example: ZFS on Linux on Fusion-io, or ZFS zvols on hardware RAID with XFS on top.
- Some of the ZFS best practices in Solaris/Illumos/Nexenta-land don't translate to Linux or are counterintuitive (zvol tuning, for instance).
As for the others...
- LVM is in wide use, but not a direct competitor to ZFS.
- BtrFS never hit its stride.
- Ceph has a place and definite support in certain circles. I probably wouldn't build on it as a direct-attach storage platform, though.
- Gluster has a community and some mindshare, too. But again, it's for a narrow set of applications.