Advanced Storage Management with Stratis and VDO

In this chapter, we will learn about Stratis and Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO).

Stratis is a storage management tool to simplify running the most typical daily tasks. It uses the underlying technologies explained in the previous chapters, such as LVM, partition schemas, and filesystems.

VDO is a storage layer that includes a driver that sits between our applications and the storage devices to provide deduplication and compression of the data stored, as well as tools to manage this functionality. This will allow us, for example, to maximize the ability of our system to hold virtual machine (VM) instances that will only consume disk space for the bits that are different between them while only having one copy of the common ones.

We can also use VDO for storing different copies of our backups, knowing that disk usage will still be optimized. By the end of this chapter, we will know how VDO works and what is required to set it up...