What is SimpliVity File System ( SVTFS ) ?

[Karthik7]

Could someone please explain what's SVTFS, where is it applied ( front or the back drives ), and how is it related to NFS?

Thanks in advance.

[B0ris]

SVTFS is applied to the front disks (they are in RAID5 or RAID6 - depends on the size of SImplivity storage) ... Rear are "system disks" - RAID1

[DaveOb]

NFS is presented to the ESXi as that is the language it understands,SVTFS is the core process running on the virtual controllers that provides the distributed file system,

The back drives  x2 are used for the ESXi and Virtual controller install,

The font drives are under the control of the Omnicube virtual controller OVC and that is where the distributed data resides,

This blogs from one of our senior engineers is a great explanation of how the system stores data.

https://community.hpe.com/t5/Shifting-to-Software-Defined/How-VM-data-is-managed-within-HPE-SimpliVity-clusters-Part-5/ba-p/7046464#.XP5eCFxKiUk

[Karthik7]

Thanks a lot for the explanation. Now, two questions arise based on your explanation.

1. ) That means, OVC doesn't control the back drives? 

2.) ESXi doesn't understand VMFS?

[DaveOb]

The OVC controls only the front drives.
The back drives are the boot drives for ESXi and a local datastore where the OVC VM lives.the front drives are controlled by OVC via pci passthrough.


ESXi understands it but we do not present vmfs.that is a design decision for a hyperconverged system block level such as vmfs would be far more complex with few benefits to make the effort worthwhile.