Great things sometimes start with a crazy experiment. Before the AI age, many of us shelved crazy ideas as they were too time-consuming to explore or the purpose and benefits were unclear. Nowadays, before following these thoughts and finding reasons to park the idea, we can formulate a prompt to an AI-coding agent and see what happens.
WinDRBD re-uses the unpatched DRBD code as far as possible. It consists of a shim layer around the DRBD code that expects to run within the Linux kernel. In the case of WinDRBD, the shim layer bridges DRBD’s Linux expectations to the Windows kernel that hosts it.
Recently, my colleague Joel had the idea to use the same shim-layer approach to run DRBD as a userspace process on Linux. So you have one DRBD daemon that runs per node. If you want to do testing, you can run multiple such daemons and test a whole DRBD cluster on a single Linux host. But there is a lot more, like running it under the rich user-space tooling available for hunting down coding defects.
There are more possible applications. We could turn this into a user-space-only driver for Qemu. It would make deployment a lot simpler. Also updates! As I write this newsletter, it’s too early to tell if that is feasible, but it is currently stirring a lot of activity and experiments around it.
The igniting point was a very simple prompt to Claude code: Look at winDRBD, recreate that shim for the POSIX process API. AI is truly the enabler for crazy ideas.
Moving to more familiar ground, we’ve recently made updates to a couple of blog posts: ‘Open Source VMware Alternatives That Can Integrate With LINBIT Storage Solutions,’ and ‘Comparing Open Source Virtualization Platforms.’
Also, LINBIT’s Matt Kereczman has written a guest post for The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), titled ‘Running a self-hosted LLM in Kubernetes with vLLM.’ The article shows a lab setup that demonstrates the basic pattern: a self-hosted LLM running in Kubernetes, backed by replicated LINSTOR-managed persistent storage, and accessible through a standard OpenAI-compatible API.
Finally, the latest software updates include LINBIT SDS For Windows 1.0.3, LINSTOR Operator 2.10.8, and drbd-reactor v1.12.0.
