The purpose of this guide is to provide installation and configuration instructions for implementing Red Hat’s Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) and LINBIT®’s DRBD®.
VDO is a virtual block device driver that provides inline deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning for block storage in Linux. VDO operates within the Linux kernel and is managed by LVM.
DRBD is a virtual block device driver that provides block-level replication between two or more peers over a network. DRBD operates within the Linux kernel and is managed by the drbdadm userland utility.
NOTE: Both DRBD and VDO can also be managed by LINSTOR®, LINBIT’s SDS tool for managing block storage, however that is outside the scope of this guide. For more information see the link LINSTOR User’s Guide.
Combining DRBD and VDO by layering DRBD over VDO will provide both data deduplication and synchronous replication of thin-provisioned volumes to your application’s storage. Volumes created within the same volume group will be deduplicated, creating a deduplication domain that spans the entire volume group. Container and virtual machine (VM) images are an excellent use case for such storage topologies, as VMs and containers will share much similar data, and high availability (HA) can be achieved by synchronously replicating virtual disks or container persistent volumes between hypervisors.
