Need help with determining which filesystem options are supported with IRIS for UNIX on the Linux platform
I am looking to run IRIS for UNIX on the Linux Ubuntu 22.04 platform and need to determine which filesystem configurations are considered supported. The three options under consideration are Ext4, LVM with Ext4, and OpenZFS. Currently, the system is running on a raw Ext4 filesystem, but there is a desire to switch to either LVM with Ext4 or OpenZFS to make it easier to handle disk usage.
This leads to two questions:
Are either of these two configurations considered to be tested and supported by InterSystems?
Are there any issues or concerns with transitioning data and logs from a raw Ext4 partition to either of the alternatives?
Comments
The list of supported file systems for your version (2023.1) can be found here.
The recommendation is XFS from Supported File Systems.
As mentioned by @Alexander Pettitt, xfs is recommended, but ext4 is supported as well.
I've used both for LVM2 LVs on RedHat at multiple high-volume customers without issue. For my personal development environments I use Ubuntu 22.04 with LVM2 and ext4 LVs.
As mentioned by @Brett Saviano the XFS is recommended on Ubuntu, but ext3 and ext4 are supported.
Read notes to choose the better.
LVM is also solid and in large environment, even if it introduce a little overread, it can be usefull in changing disks layout.
You can add space or move data without service disruption.
With FS on whole disks you must copy data files and this must be done with services down.
XFS is the recommended filesystem to use for most cases. It supports larger files, where ext4 has a 16 TB limit. Its journaling is faster. It's optimized for parallel I/O. It's more resilient. Both XFS and ext4 are rock solid.
There are certain use cases where ext4 may be slightly better. The journal file is an example of this. It also is a bit more flexible in certain areas.
We have not been impressed with OpenZFS performance in IRIS, and don't recommend that path.
LVM technology works great, either with XFS or ext4. A large number of our customers use this approach. It multiplies IOPS and bandwidth linearly. You do have to use LVM backup on those volumes.