Space balancing heuristics to facilitate transfer of ownership of allocation areas within a distributed storage system using disaggregated storage

A non-transitory machine readable medium storing instructions, which when executed by one or more processing resources of a distributed storage system, cause the distributed storage system to:

• provide a storage pod having a group of disks containing a plurality of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) groups, wherein an entirety of a global physical volume block number (PVBN) space associated with the storage pod is accessible to all nodes of a plurality of nodes of a cluster representing the distributed storage system via their respective dynamically extensible file systems (DEFSs) and wherein storage space associated with the group of storage devices is partitioned into a plurality of allocation areas (AAs), in which a given AA of the plurality of AAs is owned by a given DEFS of a plurality of DEFSs of the cluster;
• determine one or more storage space metrics based on usage information relating to the plurality of AAs reported by or on behalf of their respective owning DEFSs of the plurality of DEFSs;
• identify a set of multiple donor DEFSs and a set of multiple recipient DEFSs from among the plurality of DEFSs based on the usage information;
• and
• facilitate space balancing by matching at least one donor DEFS of the set of multiple donor DEFSs with a recipient DEFS of the set of multiple recipient DEFSs, wherein the matching includes iterating through each recipient DEFS of the set of multiple recipient DEFSs in order of decreasing storage space needs of the recipient DEFS and identifying one or more AAs that meet the storage space needs of the recipient DEFS from AAs available for donation from the set of multiple donor DEFSs.

A distributed storage system comprising:

• one or more hardware processing resources;
• and
• instructions that when executed by the one or more hardware processing resources cause the distributed storage system to:
• provide a storage pod having a group of storage devices containing a plurality of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) groups, wherein an entirety of a global physical volume block number (PVBN) space associated with the storage pod is accessible to all nodes of a plurality of nodes of a cluster representing the distributed storage system via their respective dynamically extensible file systems (DEFSs) and wherein storage space associated with the group of storage devices is partitioned into a plurality of allocation areas (AAs), in which a given AA of the plurality of AAs is owned by a given DEFS of a plurality of DEFSs of the cluster;
• determine one or more storage space metrics based on usage information relating to the plurality of AAs reported by or on behalf of their respective owning DEFSs of the plurality of DEFSs;
• identify a set of multiple donor DEFSs and a set of multiple recipient DEFSs from among the plurality of DEFSs based on the usage information;
• and
• facilitate space balancing by matching at least one donor DEFS of the set of multiple donor DEFSs with a recipient DEFS of the set of multiple recipient DEFSs, wherein the matching includes iterating through each recipient DEFS of the set of multiple recipient DEFSs in order of decreasing storage space needs of the recipient DEFS and identifying one or more AAs that meet the storage space needs of the recipient DEFS from AAs available for donation from the set of multiple donor DEFSs.