Block storage questions

The Block Storage Volumes that we offer use a combination of HDD and NVMe drives.

You can attach up to eight Block Storage Volumes
to a single Linode.

After installing freeBSD on your Linode you can create the block storage volumes and attach them. Run the following command from the Linode to confirm that the volumes are available:

$ egrep 'da[0-9]|cd[0-9]' /var/run/dmesg.boot

Drives containing "Linode Volume" will be associated with block storage volumes.

Once you have the drive names you can run the zpool create command to create your storage pool.

zpool create storage da1 da2 da3

The example above creates a storage pool named 'storage' from the 3 storage volumes da1, da2 and da3.

I was able to get the pool up and running after installing freeBSD and running the zpool create command with the drives that I wanted to be included in the RAID.

You write:

The Block Storage Volumes that we offer use a combination of HDD and NVMe drives.

I figured that out by myself. Thanks for answering…

You also write:

You can attach up to eight Block Storage Volumes to a single Linode.

If I allocate, say, 80 GiB of block storage, am I free to carve it up into volumes as I desire?

Thanks in advance…

-- sw

• I built a FreeBSD nanode following the documentation provided by Linode.

• I allocated 3 block storage volumes of 15Gb each and attached them to the nanode.

• I arranged them in a ZFS RAIDZ pool (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs-zpool.html).

• I copied some files from one of my other Linodes to the RAIDZ pool.

• I removed one of the volumes in the RAIDZ pool. All my files were still available.

• I restored the removed volume to the RAIDZ pool and watched the pool re-silver (heal itself). I did a "scrub" (checksum verification…a health check) and watched the progress.

• I built a couple of ports and built/installed a new kernel.

All of this runs incredibly fast. The clang compiler on FreeBSD runs circles around gcc !

I'm going to fool around with this for a few more days…install some more ports and refine the kernel to make it smaller.

-- sw