Stratis is a relatively new filesystem built on top of existing storage technologies in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 that aims to simplify the management of layered local storage. In this article, we will guide you through the process of installing Stratis on your RHEL 9 system and show you how to use it to manage your storage.

1. Installation

To install Stratis on RHEL 9, you will first need to enable the EPEL repository by running the following command:

sudo dnf install -y https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm

Next, you can install the Stratis packages by running the following command:

sudo dnf install -y stratis-cli stratisd

Once the installation is complete, you can start the Stratis daemon and enable it to start automatically on boot by running the following commands:

sudo systemctl start stratisd.service
sudo systemctl enable stratisd.service

1. Creating a Stratis pool

With Stratis installed and running, you can now create a Stratis pool to manage your storage. To create a new pool, run the following command:

sudo stratis pool create mypool /dev/sda

Replace ‘/dev/sda’ with the device or devices you want to include in your new pool. You can also specify additional options such as the encryption method and the pool size when creating a new pool.

1. Creating a Stratis filesystem

Once you have created a Stratis pool, you can create a filesystem on the pool by running the following command:

sudo stratis filesystem create mypool myfs

Replace ‘mypool’ with the name of the pool you created in the previous step and ‘myfs’ with the name of the filesystem you want to create. You can also specify optional parameters such as the filesystem size and the encryption method when creating a new filesystem.

1. Managing your storage with Stratis

Now that you have set up your Stratis pool and filesystem, you can start managing your storage using Stratis commands. Some common tasks you can perform include adding and removing devices from a pool, resizing a pool or filesystem, and monitoring the status of your Stratis configuration.

To add a new device to an existing pool, you can use the following command:

sudo stratis pool add-data mypool /dev/sdb

Replace ‘/dev/sdb’ with the device you want to add to the pool.

To resize a pool or filesystem, you can use the following commands:

sudo stratis pool resize mypool +5G
sudo stratis filesystem resize mypool myfs +1G

Replace ‘5G’ and ‘1G’ with the size you want to add to the pool or filesystem.

To monitor the status of your Stratis configuration, you can use the following command:

sudo stratis pool list
sudo stratis filesystem list

These commands will provide you with information about the pools and filesystems you have created, including their names, sizes, and status.

In conclusion, Stratis is a powerful tool that can help simplify the management of layered local storage on RHEL 9. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can easily install Stratis on your system and start using it to manage your storage efficiently. Give it a try and see how much easier managing your storage can be with Stratis!