storix is designed to perform automation of storage management tasks for linux appliances. This tool can be used to create storage volumes using LVM to store application specific data.

Functionality:

• Storage profiles - Define multiple storage profiles and use them based on the actual storage capacity presented by the underlying storage devices.
• Disk Selection - Select specific disks to be used for storage and allocate volumes only on those disks.
• Volume Groups - Define volume groups based for a disk pool.
• Volumes - Allocate volumes, create the specified file system and mount them at a defined mount point in the root file system.

A stroix storage profile document defines the disks, volume groups and volumes for a given storage profile. There can be multiple storage profiles defined but only one storage profile can be used at a time. Profile selection is usually based on the appliance type or product type and is done external to storix tool. Storix expects the profile file to be present at /etc/storix/storage.yaml.

storix:
  disks:
    - disk-pool: fast-disks
      match:
        - type: ssd
          min: 100GiB
          max: 1TiB
          attachement: RAID
        - type: ssd
          min: 100GiB
          max: 1TiB
          attachement: PCIE
    - disk-pool: slow-disks
      match:
        - type: hdd
          min: 1TiB
          max: 3TiB
          attachement: SATA
  volume-groups:
    - name: fast0
      label: fast
      disk-pool: fast-disks
    - name: slow0
      label: slow
      disk-pool: slow-disks
  volumes:
    - name: logs
      group: fast
      size: 100GiB
      fs: ext4
      mount: /var/log
    - name: techsupport
      group: slow
      size: 40GiB
      fs: ext4
      mount: /var/techsupport

The profile can be changed in a compatible way like adding new disks, new volume groups and new volumes. Storix will automatically detect only the operations that need to done and perform those. In other words, storix can do create, update for compatible changes and retrieve operations. Deletion of volumes, volume groups and disks is not supported. A blanket storage wipe command is provided to wipe all the storage and start fresh. This is good enough for an appliance use case where the state of the application running on the appliance can be wiped all at once and started fresh.

⚠️ Note: Only blank disks are considered for disk selection, if there is a partition table present on the disk, it will be ignored. Users can either wipe-disk or use the explicit add-disk command to manually add a disk with existing partition table to the storage pool.

1. Select all the storix disks that have the storix partition and wipe the partition table and make the disk a blank disk. Naturally all volumes and volume groups that are on these disks will be wiped.

storix wipe-disk <disk>

1. Add a disk or a partition to the storage pool. This command is useful when a disk is not or there are pre-created partitions that can be used for storage.

storix add-device <device> <disk-pool>

1. Allocate the disks, volume groups and volumes based on the profile.

storix allocate

1. Clean only the partitions allocated by the current storix profile.

storix clean

1. Show commands to display storage information.

storix show disks [--all] [--allocated] [--unallocated]
storix show vg [--label <label>]
storix show volumes [--group <label>]
storix show status