One year ago, we announced the LINBIT SDS GUI, intending to add another benefit to the subscription products offered by LINBIT. A year later, we reevaluated the situation. I asked my sales team the question:
Will the added benefit of the GUI help you sell more LINBIT support subscriptions?
I got a clear answer: No.
There are often conflicting views on this type of subject between the different positions in the company. The developers want to open-source everything because it makes the life of developers easier. Usually, sales professionals and business developers have the opposite opinion, saying we need more value to delineate from the open source users. It was a relieving exception to have general agreement on this change.
Since Yesterday, the LINBIT SDS GUI source code has been made available on GitHub under the terms of the GPLv3.
Of course, we continue to develop it and look forward to contributions from the community.
The package is named linstor-gui and is an HTML5 GUI based on the react/js framework. It allows you to inspect and modify all LINSTOR objects. It is equally powerful as the linstor CLI client. It enables you to examine and modify storage pools, resource groups, resource definitions, nodes, NICs, snapshots, LINSTOR remotes, and backup schedules (and maybe even more I am unaware of).
It is not a setup wizard. It does not spare you from understanding the LINSTOR concepts. However, it does help by giving you a visual representation and spares you from remembering the CLI commands. Here is an introduction blog post on it.
As we look forward to receiving community contributions to the GUI, we have also recently enjoyed engaging with the community in person. Last week, I had the opportunity to present at Container Days in Hamburg. Next week, the LINBIT team and I will be at the Open Source Summit Europe, where we have three sessions on the program for the ones attending.
Moving onto LINBIT content, we recently published ‘Highly Available NFS for Proxmox With LINSTOR Gateway’ on YouTube, which demonstrates how LINSTOR Gateway makes it easy to create highly available NFS exports for Proxmox.
I’d also like to share the first edition of another LINBIT newsletter from my esteemed colleague and LINBIT COO, Brian Hellman. It will be sent out quarterly and focus on the business of open source. You can read the first edition here.
In September, the only software release thus far is the LINSTOR Operator reaching version 2.6. It comes with a new way of mapping Kubernetes node labels to LINSTOR properties, which, of course, is very helpful if you want to influence the placement of DRBD replicas based on these Kubernetes node labels.
