Formatting and Mounting Bricks

Creating a Thinly Provisioned Logical Volume

To create a thinly provisioned logical volume, proceed with the following steps:

  1. Create a physical volume(PV) by using the pvcreate command. For example:

# pvcreate --dataalignment 1280K /dev/sdb

Here, /dev/sdb is a storage device. Use the correct dataalignment option based on your device.

Note

The device name and the alignment value will vary based on the device you are using.

  1. Create a Volume Group (VG) from the PV using the vgcreate command: For example:

# vgcreate --physicalextentsize 128K gfs_vg /dev/sdb

It is recommended that only one VG must be created from one storage device.

  1. Create a thin-pool using the following commands:

    1. Create an LV to serve as the metadata device using the following command:

    # lvcreate -L metadev_sz --name metadata_device_name VOLGROUP

    For example:

    # lvcreate -L 16776960K --name gfs_pool_meta gfs_vg

    1. Create an LV to serve as the data device using the following command:

    # lvcreate -L datadev_sz --name thin_pool VOLGROUP

    For example:

    # lvcreate -L 536870400K --name gfs_pool gfs_vg

    1. Create a thin pool from the data LV and the metadata LV using the following command:

    # lvconvert --chunksize STRIPE_WIDTH --thinpool VOLGROUP/thin_pool --poolmetadata VOLGROUP/metadata_device_name

    For example:

    # lvconvert --chunksize 1280K --thinpool gfs_vg/gfs_pool --poolmetadata gfs_vg/gfs_pool_meta

Note

By default, the newly provisioned chunks in a thin pool are zeroed to prevent data leaking between different block devices.

# lvchange --zero n VOLGROUP/thin_pool

For example:

# lvchange --zero n gfs_vg/gfs_pool

  1. Create a thinly provisioned volume from the previously created pool using the lvcreate command:

For example:

# lvcreate -V 1G -T gfs_vg/gfs_pool -n gfs_lv

It is recommended that only one LV should be created in a thin pool.

Format bricks using the supported XFS configuration, mount the bricks, and verify the bricks are mounted correctly.

  1. Run # mkfs.xfs -f -i size=512 -n size=8192 -d su=128k,sw=10 DEVICE to format the bricks to the supported XFS file system format. Here, DEVICE is the thin LV. The inode size is set to 512 bytes to accommodate for the extended attributes used by GlusterFS.

Run # mkdir /mountpoint to create a directory to link the brick to.

Add an entry in /etc/fstab:

  /dev/gfs_vg/gfs_lv    /mountpoint  xfs rw,inode64,noatime,nouuid      1 2

Run # mount /mountpoint to mount the brick.

Run the df -h command to verify the brick is successfully mounted:

  # df -h
  /dev/gfs_vg/gfs_lv   16G  1.2G   15G   7% /exp1