As this is the final newsletter of 2024, I took the opportunity to review all the announcements we made this year.
On the DRBD side, we fixed increasingly exotic bugs. That aligns with the observation that customers use it in larger installations and fleet sizes. The biggest we know of has about 8PB storage under LINSTOR management and provides over 22.000 highly available storage volumes for VMs and containers.
On the LINSTOR side, the last holes in the feature landscape have been filled. In addition, the growing fleet sizes led to new software requirements, like the capability to detect faltering machines, which affects the LINSTOR satellite’s ability to answer requests from the controller in a reasonable time.
We made the LINSTOR-GUI open-source software. The OpenNebula and Proxmox integration plugins had new, major releases. On the Proxmox side, it now supports reattaching LISTOR/DRBD volumes to different VMs.
LINSTOR-gateway can create multiple NFS exports backed by a multi-volume DRBD resource. DRBD-reactor and LINBIT VSAN had multiple minor releases.
For WinDRBD, the focus switched from the 1.1 series to 1.2. The latter has a much-improved compatibility layer, easing the porting work, and finally bases WinDRBD on its Linux base versions 9.1 and 9.2.
What a year!
After reflecting on the year, I also want to recap a few other recent events. Yesterday, we held our Q4 Community Meeting with special guest Andrija Panic from ShapeBlue. After we launched the LINBIT® CloudStack® HCI Appliance last month, we used this meeting to do a live demonstration of the installation process and addressed all arising questions. Find more information on the webpage and the blog post.
In addition, we recently wrote about CloudStack on our blog. ‘Comparing CloudStack, OpenNebula & OpenStack’ was written by LINBIT Documentation Specialist Michael Troutman to help people learn more about three of the most popular open source virtualization management platforms for large IaaS deployments.
Also new on the LINBIT blog, ‘Replicating Data in Distributed Systems by Using Snapshot Shipping in LINSTOR,’ by LINBIT Solutions Architect Yusuf Yıldız, introduces readers to snapshot shipping. The post demonstrates the importance of a total data storage solution.
Additionally, ‘Development Work on the WinDRBD 1.2 Branch for Highly Available Windows Services’ by LINBIT Developer Johannes Khoshnazar-Thoma is an update on the LINBIT team’s WinDRBD development work, particularly the WinDRBD 1.2 branch.
Regarding software updates, the team has recently released drbd-reactor v1.6.0, LINSTOR Operator v2.7.1, and LINSTOR Gateway v1.7.0.
Before I go, let me say we are not short of exciting plans for 2025. They include the multi-DC work in DRBD that will deprecate the old stacking feature, the multi-pathing work in LINSTOR, upstreaming DRBD to Linux mainline, and the planned DRBD witness node as a cloud service.
