What is Stratis and how does it relate to LVM and XFS?

Stratis is a higher-level storage manager that wires together LVM, thin provisioning, and XFS behind a single simple pool-and-filesystem interface, managed by a daemon.

LVM is powerful but multi-step (PV → VG → LV → mkfs → mount). Stratis hides that machinery: you add disks to a pool, create filesystems in the pool, and it orchestrates LVM + thin provisioning + XFS underneath for you. It's a managed layer, not a new filesystem.

Block devices → Pool → Filesystems
/dev/vdb,/dev/vdc      fs1, fs2 (share the pool's space, grow on demand)

Key traits:

• Internally built on LVM thin pools + XFS — you get their capabilities without driving them by hand.
• Filesystems draw space dynamically from the pool (thin provisioned), so you don't pre-size them.
• Built-in snapshots.
• It's service-based: a daemon, stratisd, owns the storage and must be running for it to work.

dnf install stratis-cli stratisd
systemctl enable --now stratisd               # start the daemon now + at boot
stratis pool create pool1 /dev/vdb            # build a pool
stratis pool add-data pool1 /dev/vdc          # grow the pool with another disk
stratis filesystem create pool1 fs1           # a thin filesystem in the pool
stratis filesystem snapshot pool1 fs1 snap1   # point-in-time snapshot

Trade-off: Stratis trades LVM's fine-grained control for simplicity — ideal when you want pool-style storage without learning the full LVM toolchain.

Go deeper:

• Stratis (configuration daemon) — Wikipedia — how stratisd orchestrates LVM thin pools and XFS via D-Bus.