Vertica Support for XFS file system format

Vertica recommends ext4 because it's most used for internal QA. XFS works but performance is not guaranteed and if any issues are raised appear to be related to the filesystem, we may have to push back to Red Hat to offer support and tuning advice as our official testing and best practices on XFS are very limited.

The “recommended list” means that they have been used in the test environments. In the last document the word "recommended" has replaced the word “supported”. It does not state that other options do not work, it all depends on the use case. If other options are used and some issue is observed, then it requires more investigations based on the use case. In some situations one might need to repeat the use case based on one of the recommended file systems. Note: we have been running many tests on XFS since last December and we have not observed any issue that is related to XFS until now. But testing is continuing. In the past, some customers have used XFS by using a non-published option of “admintools” for creation of the database. In the last release the “--skip-fs-checks” option was removed that was not a published option, and only very limited people have used it. This change helps to simplify the “install vertica” and “admintools” for those who want to use other than recommended file systems, but there can be some risk associated with cases outside the list. In regards to XFS as it goes through more test cycles with no observed issue, then that can be added to the recommended list. Note: I am not aware of and issue with use cases of the customers that are using XFS, for more than 1 year.