STO-120 · Storage & Filesystems · Practitioner
Device Mapper & LVM — full syllabus
Composing block devices: linear, striped, snapshot, thin provisioning, crypt and cache targets.
Who this course is for
System administrators and platform engineers who manage Linux storage stacks and need to compose, resize, encrypt and — above all — recover device-mapper configurations without losing data.
Prerequisites
- Solid Linux administration including disk partitioning
- Command-line comfort and basic shell scripting
- Block-device basics (STO-101 helpful, not required)
Course outline
Day 1 — The device mapper model and LVM basics
- Device mapper architecture: mapped devices, targets and tables
- dmsetup by hand: building linear and striped devices
- LVM as a dm client: physical volumes, volume groups, logical volumes
- Extents, allocation policies and online resizing
- Reading the stack: lsblk, dmsetup info/table, lvs/vgs/pvs reporting
Day 2 — Snapshots, thin provisioning and encryption
- Classic snapshots: copy-on-write mechanics and why performance degrades
- Thin pools: the metadata device, overprovisioning and monitoring
- dm-crypt and LUKS: what happens at open, key management, cipher choices
- Integrity targets at a glance: dm-integrity and dm-verity
- Ordering the stack: what goes above what, and why
Day 3 — Caching, RAID and recovery
- dm-cache and dm-writecache: architecture, policies and statistics
- dm-raid vs mdadm: which software RAID lives where
- Activation, udev and how a stack assembles at boot
- Recovery drills: missing PV, corrupted VG metadata, failed thin pool
- vgcfgrestore, thin_check and thin_repair — practised before you need them
Hands-on labs
- Lab: compose linear, striped and snapshot devices with dmsetup alone, then reproduce the layout in LVM and compare the tables
- Lab: build a thin pool, overprovision it, fill it past the physical limit — then observe and repair the failure
- Lab: encrypt a volume with LUKS/dm-crypt, benchmark the overhead with fio and tune cipher and workqueue options
- Lab: put dm-cache in front of a slow device and measure hit rate and latency from the cache statistics
- Lab: recover from deliberately corrupted VG metadata and a broken thin-pool metadata device using backups and the repair tools
Capstone project
Design, assemble and then rescue a realistic stack: RAID-backed physical volumes, a thin pool, an encrypted and cached logical volume on top — documented as one diagram plus the exact command history. In the final session the stack is broken in a way you do not choose, and you produce a recovery runbook with proof (data checksums before and after) that nothing was lost.
What you leave with
- Device-mapper tables you can read and write by hand, not just through LVM
- Thin provisioning and snapshot mechanics understood well enough to operate safely
- Encryption and caching layers added with measured, not assumed, overhead
- A personal recovery drill set: metadata restore, thin repair, missing-PV scenarios
Upcoming dates
| Dates | Where | Seats | Early bird | Regular | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Oct – 13 Oct 20263 full days | RiyadhIn person · KAFD Conference Centre | 9 of 14 | — | SAR 7,880 | |
| 18 Oct – 20 Oct 20263 full days | Kuwait CityIn person · Al Hamra Tower | 4 of 14 | — | KWD 650 | |
| 18 Oct – 20 Oct 20263 full days | MuscatIn person · Knowledge Oasis Muscat | 9 of 14 | — | OMR 810 | |
| 25 Oct – 1 Nov 20266 half-days | Gulf bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 GMT+3 | 3 of 20 | — | US$1,500 | |
| 26 Oct – 28 Oct 20263 full days | OttawaIn person · Kanata North Tech Park | 4 of 14 | — | CAD 2,860 | |
| 2 Nov – 4 Nov 20263 full days | TorontoIn person · MaRS Discovery District | 9 of 14 | — | CAD 2,860 | |
| 2 Nov – 4 Nov 20263 full days | LondonIn person · Shoreditch Works | 4 of 14 | — | GBP 1,640 | |
| 2 Nov – 9 Nov 20266 half-days | Europe bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 CET | 8 of 20 | — | US$1,500 | |
| 2 Nov – 9 Nov 20266 half-days | Americas bandLive online · 13:00–17:00 ET | 13 of 20 | — | US$1,500 | |
| 9 Nov – 11 Nov 20263 full days | BerlinIn person · Factory Görlitzer Park | 9 of 14 | EUR 1,740until 10 Oct |
Book a seat, or bring this course to your team
Seats can be reserved online; private delivery runs on-site or live online, adapted to your stack.
Questions about fit or prerequisites? Email hello@kernelsystems.academy. To save this syllabus, print this page to PDF from your browser.