EZIO Developer and User Guide

Introduction

EZIO is a tool for rapid server disk image cloning/deployment within local area network. We utilize BitTorrent protocol to speed up the data distribution. Also, we use partclone to dump used filesystem blocks, and EZIO receiver can directly write received blocks to raw disk, which greatly improves performance.

Motivation

EZIO is inspired by Clonezilla and BTsync (Resilio) for its idea to transfer data and massive deployment. The issue of Clonezilla is that, it is too slow in real world due to multicast feature. In real world, all clients must register to Clonezilla server before startting deployment, which cost too much time. In addition, whenever there is a client that doesn't get data or gets discorrect one and need to be re-transferred, it causes server a lot of effort. Most importanlty, in most case, the clients which cannot get data correctly may be broken, it will make server to re-transfer data again and again until it reaches its re-transfer limit and quit. Due to above issues of Clonezilla, EZIO make a difference by changing transfer mechanism. EZIO implement transfer function on top of BitTorrent, and make a lot of progress on deployment speed.

Feature

• Faster than Clonezilla by implementing data transfer on top of the BitTorrent protocol. Clonezilla uses multicast for transfer,for which in practice are extremely slow due to limitation of multicast and clients' status. Limitation of multicast, for example, they will cost too much time waiting all the clients to register to the server. As for Computer status, for example, when there are a small amount of computers which don't have enough disk storage or might be broken, in this case, they won't get data from server successfully and need to re-transfer data, which cost lots of time.

• Plenty of File systems are supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs and nilfs2 of GNU/Linux (2) FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS of MS Windows (3) HFS+ of Mac OS (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD (5) minix of Minix (6) VMFS3 and VMFS5 of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Minix, VMWare ESX and Chrome OS/Chromium OS, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in EZIO.

• Different from BTsync file level transfer, EZIO is block level transfer. Whenever a client gets wrong data, in file level transfer, it will take a lot of time re-transfer whole file. However, in block level transfer, all we need to do is to re-transfer the specific piece of data.

• Saves data in the hard disk by using partclone.

Installation

Minimum System Requirements

• 64bit
• 1GB RAM

Dependencies

• Debian 11 or above
• libtorrent-rasterbar>=2.0.8
• libboost>=1.74
• cmake>=3.16
• spdlog
• gRPC

sudo apt install build-essential cmake libboost-all-dev libtorrent-rasterbar-dev libgrpc-dev libgrpc++-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler-grpc libspdlog-dev

Build and Install

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make
sudo make install

We also provide a Dockerfile for the ease of installation and CI testing. To build the image type this:

docker build . -t ezio-latest-img

Usage

Partclone

Partclone provides utilities to save and restore used filesystem blocks (and skips the unused blocks) from/to a partition.

The newest partclone will support dump your disk to EZIO image, and generate torrent.info simultaneously.

sudo partclone.extfs -c -T -s /dev/sda1 -O target/ --buffer_size 16777216

or you want generate torrent, but don't want BT image.

sudo partclone.extfs -c -t -s /dev/sda1 -O target/ --buffer_size 16777216

When finishing to dump disk, you will see the file like the picture. And using utils/partclone_create_torrent.py to generate torrent for deploy.

utils/partclone_create_torrent.py -c CloneZilla -p sda1 -i <some_path>/torrent.info -o sda1.torrent -t 'http://<some tracker>:6969/announce'

EZIO

When you have a sda1.torrent you can deploy or clone your disk via Network.

Help

Allowed Options:
  -h [ --help ]          some help
  -F [ --file ]          read data from file rather than raw disk
  --listen arg           gRPC service listen address and port, default is 

Seeding

• Seeding from BT image

./ezio -F
./utils/create_proto_py.sh
./utils/add_torrent_seed.py sda1.torrent /some/path/to/sda1

• Seeding from Disk

./ezio
./utils/create_proto_py.sh
./utils/add_torrent_seed.py sda1.torrent /dev/sda1

Downloading

• Downloading to Disk

./ezio
./utils/create_proto_py.sh
./utils/add_torrent.py sda1.torrent /dev/sda1

• Proxy or save the image

./ezio -F
./utils/create_proto_py.sh
./utils/add_torrent.py sda1.torrent /some/path/to/save/sda1

Proxy

If you want to deploy over Internet or some bottleneck, you can proxy the torrent via regular BT software like qBittorrent. And don't let internal peer connect outside directly.

Easy Usage to Deploy Disk or OS via EZIO

Using CloneZilla Live (version>=testing-2.6.0-31). CloneZilla contains EZIO in its Lite Server Mode. It will be most easy way to deploy your disk or OS via BT.

Design

In raw_storage.cpp implements a libtorrent custom storage, to allow the receiver to write received blocks directly to raw disk.

We store the "offset" in hex into torrent, the "length" into file attribute. so BT will know where the block is, and it can use the offset to seek in the disk

{
    'announce': 'http://tracker.site1.com/announce',
    'info':
    {
        'name': 'root',
        'piece length': 262144,
        'files':
        [
            {'path': ['0000000000000000'], 'length': 4096}, // store offset and length of blocks
            {'path': ['0000000000020000'], 'length': 8192},
            ...
        ],
        'pieces': 'some piece hash here'
    }
}

Benchmark

Compare with CloneZilla Multicast Mode with EZIO Mode.

Experimental environment

• Network: Cisco 3560G
• Server: Dell T1700 with Intel Xeon E3-1226, 16G ram, 1TB hard disk
• PC Client: 32 Client, same as Server
• Image: Ubuntu Linux with 50GB data in disk. Multicast Image is compressed by pzstd. BT Image is raw file.

Result

Time in second

Open Access Journal

More details about EZIO design and benchmark are in A Novel Massive Deployment Solution Based on the Peer-to-Peer Protocol.

Limitation

• Making a torrent cost lots of time due to sha-1 hash need to be done on every single piece of data.
• EZIO will be extremely slow when the number of clients is too small.
• Due to partclone limitation, for unsupported filesystem, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in EZIO.

Future

• We need more speed
• gRPC to control
• Integrate in OpenStack Ironic Project, improve Mirantis' works
  • http://web.archive.org/web/20211124125644/https://www.mirantis.com/blog/cut-ironic-provisioning-time-using-torrents/
  • https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/ironic-specs/+/311091

Contribute

• Issue Tracker: https://github.com/tjjh89017/ezio/issues
• Source Code: https://github.com/tjjh89017/ezio

Support

If you are having issues, please let us know. EZIO main developer email is located at: [email protected]

Special Thanks

• National Center for High-performance Computing, NCHC, Taiwan
  • Provide many devices to test stability and knowledge support.

License

The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 license.