VxFS 6.0 and compression (a real must have).

Here's a little personal info: I like good movies and good anime (for the kids). I like them even better when stored as DVD5 or DVD9 iso images for playing them with VLC (VideoLan Client) on the wide-screen TV.

But as my list of DVD's grew, my VxFS 3Tb filesystem started to become full (about 400 DVDs). With VxFS version 9 compression feature, I gained some time and was able to reclaim some space..

First of all:

Upgrade to SF6.0
Upgrade your DG (vxdg upgrade <dg>)
Upgrade your filesystem (vxupgrade -n 9 <fs>)

Which gives:

[root@thorbardin ~]# vxdg upgrade local00dg
[root@thorbardin ~]# vxupgrade -n 9 /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0
UX:vxfs vxupgrade: ERROR: V-3-25236: /dev/vx/rdsk/local00dg/movies0_lv: already at disk layout version 9.

[root@thorbardin ~]# find /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0/DVD -name \*.iso|wc -l
512

So we have 512 DVD images on this FS.

Let's start the compression process:

[root@thorbardin ~]# vxcompress -v -r /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0/DVD

You may check the compression progress with:

[root@thorbardin ~]# /opt/VRTS/bin/fsadm -S compressed /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0
 Mountpoint    Size(KB)    Available(KB)   Used(KB)   Logical_Size(KB) Space_Saved(KB)
/export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0  2929236384     146315977 2773199135       2928058770     154859635

You may also check the compression ratio for a file or a set of files with:

[root@thorbardin ~]# vxcompress -L /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0/DVD/*/*.iso
[....]
   4%    6.42 GB    6.68 GB   100%   gzip-6  1024k  /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0/DVD/Dessins_Animes/Barbapapa.iso
   7%     5.9 GB    6.33 GB   100%   gzip-6  1024k  /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0/DVD/Dessins_Animes/Albator_78_-_D6.iso
   4%    7.59 GB    7.92 GB   100%   gzip-6  1024k  /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0/DVD/Dessins_Animes/Albator_78_-_D2.iso
   4%    7.56 GB    7.88 GB   100%   gzip-6  1024k  /export/home/raistlin/.private/movies0/DVD/Dessins_Animes/Albator_78_-_D1.iso

Total:    512 files       147.7 GB (5%) storage savings

So here it is: compressing 'in-place' an existing VxFS filesystem saved me about 148Gb. Time to save more of my DVD's! Considering that DVD's are already compressed (MPEG2 streams), 5% gained over a 3Tb filesystem isn't that bad.

If you have static data or keep sparse files around (database datafiles come to mind), we've seen compression ratios of as much as 7-10x!

The nice thing is that this compression stuff is completely transparent; might even get you higher performance in some case (de-compression is done in-memory) and you can upgrade to compressed files in-place, without having to do the backup/restore dance. It's also revertable: just uncompress your files if you wish to go back.

My 2c, VxFS: good for home and enterprise use! :)