I can now share the video link to our Q2 Community Meeting, ‘Build Resilient Architectures with LINBIT SDS & Oracle Virtualization,’ which we hosted alongside our partners, Oracle. After Marcos Sungaila from Oracle spoke, I presented the LINBIT angle before Ryan on the US side at LINBIT guided the viewers through a live demo. Fate was kind to us, and the live demo went off without a hitch. It even covered both methods on how one can bring LINSTOR volumes to OLVM (oVirt).
- Via LINSTOR-Gateway and iSCSI. This allows the operator to self-host the oVirt engine on the oVirt cluster itself. It is also the preferred method for 2-node OLVM/oVirt clusters.
- Via libcinder. You should select this method if you have three or more hypervisor nodes and three or more storage nodes in the LINSTOR setup. (The two 3-node sets might contain the same machines = hyperconverged).
In summary, the combination of OLVM and LINBIT SDS offers a suitable open-source alternative to VMware. Here is my short mapping of the components:
- vCenter -> oVirt engine
- ESXi -> Oracle Linux with KVM and oVirt agent
- vSAN -> LINBIT SDS
For quite some time, Red Hat tried to commercialize oVirt under the brand name Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). After Red Hat shifted its focus to Kubevirt (brand name, OpenShift Virtualization), Broadcom disrupted its VMware user base, and Oracle positioned itself as a rescue boat for VMware refugees. I am eager to see if Oracle will have more success with the oVirt-based Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager than Red Hat was able to achieve.
Over to the LINBIT blog, ‘Using minikube to Get Started With LINSTOR in Kubernetes’ provides readers with step-by-step instructions for setting up a minikube virtual machine (VM) environment for testing and exploring LINSTOR in Kubernetes. For those who aren’t aware, minikube is a local Kubernetes environment on a single host machine that gets users up and running quickly, usually for testing or proof-of-concept purposes.
‘When to Use DRBD Proxy’ is a new LINBIT Knowledge Base article that provides a detailed but concise overview of what DRBD Proxy does complete with use cases on when you need to use it, recommendations to get the most out of it, and more.
Regarding the latest software updates, we have released LINSTOR Operator v2.9.0 and WinDRBD 1.2.1 since my previous newsletter.
