PX-StoreV2 and its considerations

PX-StoreV1 is the traditional storage backend for Portworx Enterprise, and PX-StoreV2, focuses purely on volume management with optimized metadata handling and performance metrics, making it more suitable for high-performance environments.

PX-StoreV2 is a Portworx datastore optimized for supporting IO intensive workloads for configurations utilizing high performance NVMe class devices. It efficiently manages and balances workload across nodes by dynamically assigning tasks to the most suitable nodes based on their available resources. Hence, improving performance and scalability of your cluster.

Advantages of PX-StoreV2 over PX-StoreV1

• Simplicity: PX-StoreV2 focuses on volume management only, which simplifies the architecture by managing blocks with minimal metadata, unlike PX-StoreV1, which operates as a complete filesystem. This reduces the complexity in handling RAID or device management.
• Stability: PX-StoreV2 is designed with lower metadata and refcount overhead compared to PX-StoreV1. By avoiding recursive refcounts and extent backreferences, PX-StoreV2 offers improved stability and simplicity in environments where block management is key.
• Performance:
  • Low Performance Overhead: PX-StoreV2 ensures low write amplification and predictable latencies, which provides better performance consistency for users, especially in scenarios with high throughput demands.
  • Userspace Bypass (PX fastpath): PX-StoreV2 enables the fastpath, which further improves performance by bypassing certain userspace operations.

Unsupported features for PX-StoreV2

• Upgrading from a previous Portworx version to deploy PX-StoreV2 datastore with cloud drives is not supported.
• Once Portworx is deployed with the PX-StoreV2 datastore, you can use all of Portworx's features except for the following:
  • XFS volumes
  • PX-Cache
  • add-disk pool expansion operation
  • Online pool resize