Storage pools


A storage pool is a logical grouping of a node’s physical drives. Portworx uses the space in a storage pool to dynamically create virtual volumes on containers.

Diagram showing a storage pool

Storage pool composition

Storage pools are composed of a collection of drives of the same capacity and type. When you create a pool, Portworx categorizes it according to its latency and performance in random and sequential IOPS. These performance categories are the following:

  • Low
  • Medium
  • High

Interacting with storage pools

You can form and manage storage pools using the pxctl command-line utility. You can also assign them labels, which allow you to specify them in provisioning rules you write. A storage pool’s performance category is one such label.

You can form a maximum of 32 storage pools on a single node. You may also have nodes with no storage at all in your cluster; nodes with no storage are storageless.

You can monitor your storage pools using Prometheus or the pxctl command-line utility. Refer to the Portworx integration with Prometheus for details on how to monitor your Portworx cluster with Prometheus. The Alerts using pxctl page provides details about monitoring the status of your cluster with the pxctl command-line utility.



Last edited: Tuesday, May 9, 2023