ZFS/Btrfs/LVM2-like storage with advanced features on Linux?
- by Easter Sunshine
I have 3 identical internal 7200 RPM SATA hard disk drives on a Linux machine. I'm looking for a storage set-up that will give me all of this:
Different data sets (filesystems or subtrees) can have different RAID levels so I can choose performance, space overhead, and risk trade-offs differently for different data sets while having a few number of physical disks (very important data can be 3xRAID1, important data can be 3xRAID5, unimportant reproducible data can be 3xRAID0).
If each data set has an explicit size or size limit, then the ability to grow and shrink the size limit (offline if need be)
Avoid out-of-kernel modules
R/W or read-only COW snapshots. If it's a block-level snapshots, the filesystem should be synced and quiesced during a snapshot.
Ability to add physical disks and then grow/redistribute RAID1, RAID5, and RAID0 volumes to take advantage of the new spindle and make sure no spindle is hotter than the rest (e.g., in NetApp, growing a RAID-DP raid group by a few disks will not balance the I/O across them without an explicit redistribution)
Not required but nice-to-haves:
Transparent compression, per-file or subtree. Even better if, like NetApps, analyzes the data first for compressibility and only compresses compressible data
Deduplication that doesn't have huge performance penalties or require obscene amounts of memory (NetApp does scheduled deduplication on weekends, which is good)
Resistance to silent data corruption like ZFS (this is not required because I have never seen ZFS report any data corruption on these specific disks)
Storage tiering, either automatic (based on caching rules) or user-defined rules (yes, I have all-identical disks now but this will let me add a read/write SSD cache in the future). If it's user-defined rules, these rules should have the ability to promote to SSD on a file level and not a block level.
Space-efficient packing of small files
I tried ZFS on Linux but the limitations were:
Upgrading is additional work because the package is in an external repository and is tied to specific kernel versions; it is not integrated with the package manager
Write IOPS does not scale with number of devices in a raidz vdev.
Cannot add disks to raidz vdevs
Cannot have select data on RAID0 to reduce overhead and improve performance without additional physical disks or giving ZFS a single partition of the disks
ext4 on LVM2 looks like an option except I can't tell whether I can shrink, extend, and redistribute onto new spindles RAID-type logical volumes (of course, I can experiment with LVM on a bunch of files). As far as I can tell, it doesn't have any of the nice-to-haves so I was wondering if there is something better out there. I did look at LVM dangers and caveats but then again, no system is perfect.
