ZFS with Podinate

ZFS (Zettabyte File System) is a massively scalable filesystem originally developed by Sun for their Solaris operating system. Development of ZFS now mostly centers around the open source OpenZFS project which continued work on the filesystem after Sun's acquisition.

Podinate can use ZFS based storage through the OpenEBS ZFS Provisioner

Terms

ZFS has a couple of terms you should be familiar with:

• pool - A ZFS pool is a set of one or more disks that can be used to create datasets. By default a pool is also a dataset.
• Dataset - A Dataset is similar to a partition, and can be used to store files / mounted. They are usually referred to like poolname/setname by the OpenZFS command. They can also be nested, such as pool/podinate/pvc-abc123

Compression

ZFS supports native compression. It is generally recommended to turn on in nearly all circumstances, as the compression algorithm is likely faster than all but the highest end NVMe SSD drives.

Deduplication

Deduplication uses a ton of RAM to detect blocks of identical data on the disks. Generally this is not recommended, unless you have a use case that requires storing a ton of duplicated data for some reason. Even then, the deduplication only works if duplicate blocks line up exactly on the disk.

RAID

ZFS has built in RAID support. You may be familiar with RAID levels, such as RAID0 or RAID 6. ZFS changes the names of the RAID levels slightly.

RAID Level	ZFS Equivalent	Description
RAID0	Striped vdev	Data is spread across all disks with no protection from failure
RAID1	mirror	Data is mirrored across two or more disks; if one fails read from the other
RAID5	RAIDZ1	Data is spread across all disks with one disk of redundancy
RAID6	RAIDZ2	Data is spread across all disks with two disks of redundancy
-	RAIDZ3	Data is spread across all disks with three disks of redundancy

Creating a ZFS Pool

Setting up a ZFS pool for Podinate is a pretty quick process. If you want to use just a single disk, Podinte recommends using LVM instead.

1. Install ZFS on Ubuntu

   sudo apt-get install zfsutils
   

2. Find your disks. The following commands will help you find the /dev/sd* IDs of your disks.

   sudo fdisk -l 
   ls -l /dev/disk/by-id
   

3. Option 1: Create an unencrypted pool. Create pool with two disks of redundancy and compression enabled. See RAID for the levels. To create a pool of one disk or a striped set, omit the raid level.

   zpool create -O compression=enable vault raidz2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde 
   

   Create with single disk / no redundancy (NOT recommended):

   zpool create vault /dev/sda
   

4. Option 2: Create a pool encrypted by a keyfile. If you use a keyfile on disk, the filesystem storing the key must be encrypted through some other means, for example LVM full disk encryption.

   # Create the encryption key
   head -c 32 /dev/random > /podinate/key/zfs
   
   # Create the pool 
   zpool create \
   -O compression=lz4 \
   -O encryption=aes-256-gcm \
   -O keyformat=raw \
   -O keylocation=file:///podinate/key/zfs \
   vault raidz2 \
   /dev/sda \ # Make sure to change to your actual disks
   /dev/sdb \
   /dev/sdc \
   /dev/sdd \
   /dev/sde 
   

   ZFS will remember where the key is stored and automatically mount the pool at boot.
5. Create a Dataset for Podinate: Datasets reside within a pool and are a way to divide up your ZFS pool. It's a good idea to create a separate dataset for Podinate, so you can use the pool for other things like Incus Virtual Machines later.

   zfs create vault/podinate 
   

6. (Encrypted) Unlock Encrypted Dataset on Boot: ZFS won't load the encryption key into our Podinate Dataset by default for some reason, so we have to make it.

   nano /etc/systemd/system/zfs-load-keys.service
   

   Copy in the following contents:

   [Unit]
   Description=Load all ZFS encryption keys
   DefaultDependencies=no
   Before=zfs-mount.service
   After=zfs-import.target
   Requires=zfs-import.target
   
   [Service]
   Type=oneshot
   RemainAfterExit=yes
   ExecStart=/usr/sbin/zfs load-key -a
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=zfs-mount.service
   

   And enable the service by running:

   systemctl enable zfs-load-keys
   

   All dataset keys will be loaded automatically on boot.

Conecting Pool to Podinate

Once we have a Dataset to use for Podinate, the next step is to set up the ZFS volume provisioner in our Kubernetes cluster.

Warn

You cannot edit a Kubernetes StorageClass after creating it. Check the ZFS OpenEBS Docs for parameters. If you need to change something after volumes already exist, consider creating a new StorageClass and using it alongside the existing class.

1. Install the OpenEBS ZFS Provisioner

   kubectl apply -f https://openebs.github.io/charts/zfs-operator.yaml
   

2. Create a storage class to use the dataset

   apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
   kind: StorageClass
   metadata:
       name: bulk
   parameters:
       compression: "on"
       dedup: "off"
       fstype: "zfs"
       poolname: "vault/podinate"
       shared: "yes"
       thinprovision: "true" 
   provisioner: zfs.csi.openebs.io
   volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer