migratefs

migratefs is a filesystem overlay for transparent, distributed migration of active data across separate storage systems.

This project started as a fork of fuse-overlayfs, an implementation of overlay+shiftfs in FUSE for rootless containers, but the project has significantly diverged since then, and operates on very different premises.

About

migratefs is a FUSE-based filesystem overlay designed to semalessly migrate data from one filesystem to another. It aggregates multiple, separate filesystems or directories, to present a stacked view of their contents and allows migration of modified data from the lower to the upper layer.

Table of contents

• About
• Description
  • Rationale
  • Use case
  • Features
• Usage
  • Dependencies
  • Installation
  • Configuration

Description

The purpose of migratefs is to provide a way to migrate active data across storage systems with minimal user impact. As far as users or applications are concerned, files stay in the same place, they can be accessed with the same paths during the migration, while their contents are transparently migrated from one storage system to another.

It has been designed to:

• present a merged view of several filesystems or directories (layers),
• allow reads on all layers (when the same file exist in multiple layers, the version in the highest layer is presented to the calling application),
• re-direct writes to the upper layer,
• automatically transfer modified data from lower levels to the upper layer (copyup)

It is of particular interest to migrate data between network filesystems that are mounted on the same set of clients, but can also be used locally.

Rationale

Data storage life cycle

In scientific computing environments, a substantial numbers of users typically work on large-scale HPC clusters and store their data on parallel, distributed filesystems. Those filesystems have a life time of several years, but aging hardware needs to be replaced at some point, to accommodate evolutions in storage density, I/O performance increases and user needs.

And when storage systems are replaced, data needs to be migrated.

Traditional data migration methods

There are a few typical scenarios that are generally adopted when time comes to retire an older storage system and replace it by a new one:

• copy all the data

  This is long and expensive process on filesystems that can span several petabytes and contain hundreds of millions of inodes, if not billions. It can be done in either one long offline pass, or with several successive passes of highly-tuned, distributed copy processes, each operating on a fraction of the filesystem, while the filesystem remains online ; and a final, shorter offline synchronization pass to copy over the remaining differences since the last copy. It's a fastidious operation, still require a significant downtime where users can't work, and it will likely bring over old files that are not really used anymore on the new filesystem.

• let users move their own data

  Another natural approach is to bring up both filesystems side by side, and provide a new mountpoint that users can use. They will then need to handle copying their own data, will need to change their scripts and applications to point to the newer mountpoint, which could be pretty disruptive to their workflows.

• filesystem-specific tools

  Some filesystems, such as Lustre, offer internal migration tools that could help adding new hardware to an existing storage system, transferring the data from existing equipment to newly added hardware, and then retiring the older storage components. This is usually a complex process, quite error-prone, which also require prolonged downtimes, and has some limitations.

migratefs helps solve the filesystem data migration problem by letting storage administrators enable a transparent overlay on top of their existing filesystems, that bridges both the old and the new storage systems, and makes every single write() operation on existing files participate in the migration of the active dataset, completely transparently for the users.

migratefs only migrates actively used data, is completely transparent to users and application, and doesn't require any extended downtime.

Method	copy all the data	users move their files	migratefs
ignore inactive data	⛔	✔️	✔️
transparent for users	⛔	⛔	✔️
can be done online	⛔	✔️	✔️
distributed data transfers	possible	possible	✔️

Use case

migratefs has been developed to solve the typical case of a HPC center needing to retire a shared, automatically purged /scratch filesystem, and move all of its actively-used data to a new storage system.

Many computing centers define purge policies on their large filesystems, that automatically delete files based on their age, access patterns, etc. Enabling migratefs over purged filesystems makes it easier to define the migration period, as files that are actively used will be transferred over to the new filesystem, while the files that sit idle will progressively be removed by the existing purge policies. In the end, all the new data will have been moved over to the new filesystem, and the old filesystem will be empty, so it could be retired and decommissioned.

migratefs is designed to be used temporarily, over a period of time during which data will be migrated between filesystems. When the migration is done, the migratefs layer can be removed and normal filesystem operations can be resumed.

Direct access to the underlying filesystem layers is always possible, although in case of a data migration, it's better to keep the lower levels unmodified. But new files can be written and read directly from the upper layer without any impact on migratefs functioning.

Migration timeline

Let's say you have a /scratch filesystem that needs to be retired, and you have a new filesystem ready to replace it already. The typical timeline for a data migration with migratefs would look like this:

• Step 1: during a short scheduled downtime, storage admins:

  • remount /scratch as /scratch_old
  • mount the new filesystem under /scratch_new
  • start migratefs to aggregate both filesystems under /scratch

• Step 2: user activity resumes:

  • data is transparently migrated from /scratch_old to /scratch_new while user access their files in /scratch
  • /scratch_new, initially empty, starts to receive newly written files, and copy-up'ed files form /scratch_old.
  • /scratch_old continues to be purged by the existing purge policies, and starts to empty out.

• Step 3: when /old is empty or when the migration deadline has been reached, a final downtime allows to:

  • stop migratefs
  • retire /scratch_old
  • remount /scratch_new as /scratch

Once the migration is over, users continue to use /scratch as before, except now, all their files are on the new filesystem and the old one has been retired.

During the migration period:

• all of the newly created files will be physically stored on the new filesystem,
• all the existing files that have been accessed will be migrated to the new system,
• the purge policies running on the old system will progressively delete the files that are not accessed, and empty it out.

In the end, all the active data will be on /scratch_new, and /scratch_old will be empty. All the active data would have then been migrated in a completely distributed way as each client would have participated to the migration, the old system could be retired, and the new system would be ready to use natively, without any old data lingering around.

Features

High-level

• allows migrating data between completely separate filesystems, using different hardware components, different technologies, and even of different types (GPFS to Lustre, BeeGFS to NFS, or even locally between local filesystems)
• only migrates data that users actively modify, so you won't end up with old, dead files that nobody uses anymore on your brand new filesystem
• distributes the data migration across all the hosts that access the filesystem
• completely transparent for the end users, they don't even need to know about migratefs

In practice

• node-local overlay filesystem in user space
• merge multiple directories/filesystems (layers) and seamlessly migrate data to upper layer when needed
• dispatch I/O syscalls to the right underlying layer
• multi-threaded
• works better on network filesystems
• easy to use and deploy (one process to run)

Usage

Requirements

migratefs requires libfuse 3.x.

A specfile for CentOS 7 can be found here.

Installation

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make

To build a RPM:

$ make rpm

Execution

$ migratefs -o lowerdir=/oldscratch,upperdir=/newscratch /scratch

Options

TBW

Limitations

TBW

• Read-only mode is not supported.

• Umask has precedence over Default POSIX ACLs.

• fgetxattr/fsetxattr (get/set extended attributes) of an unlinked file is not supported.

• Performance is lower than directly accessing the underlying layers