Recommended best practices and considerations for data inlining in OneFS 9.3 and later releases include the following:
- Data inlining is opportunistic and is only supported on node pools with 8KB inodes.
- No additional software, hardware, or licenses are required for data inlining.
- There are no CLI or WebUI management controls for data inlining.
- Data inlining is automatically enabled on applicable nodepools after an upgrade to OneFS 9.3 or later is committed.
- However, data inlining will only occur for new writes and OneFS will not perform any inlining during the upgrade process to OneFS 9.3 or later. Any applicable small files will instead be inlined upon their first write.
- Since inode inlining is automatically enabled globally on clusters running OneFS 9.3 or later, OneFS will recognize any diskpools with 512 byte inodes and transparently avoid inlining data on them.
- In OneFS 9.3 and later, data inlining will not be performed on regular files during tiering, truncation, upgrade, and so on.
- CloudPools Smartlink stubs, sparse files, and writable snapshot files are also not candidates for data inlining in OneFS 9.3 and later releases.
- OneFS shadow stores will not apply data inlining. As such:
- Small file packing will be disabled for inlined data files.
- Cloning will work as expected with inlined data files..
- Inlined data files will not apply deduping and non-inlined data files that are once deduped will not inline afterwards.
- Certain operations may cause data inlining to be reversed, such as moving files from an 8KB diskpool to a 512 byte diskpool, forcefully allocating blocks on a file, sparse punching, and so on.
- In OneFS 9.3 and later, there is no file system job available to perform an assessment scan for inline inode opportunities.