In my last newsletter, I mentioned the growing burden of maintaining all the integrations for LINSTOR with various workload orchestrators. When the open-source community creates an integration driver, that not only takes that burden off my team but also implies that the community perceives LINSTOR as an accepted open-source storage solution.
Incus is a workload orchestrator mainly known for running system containers. It’s a fork of LXD or, in my view, the successor of LXD. Apart from running a whole system in a container, it also supports application containers (think docker/Kubernetes), and virtual machines (KVM, to my knowledge).
In February 2024, Stéphane Graber created a feature request for a LINSTOR driver for Incus. About a year later, Stéphane merged pull request #1621 from Luís Simas, bringing a LINSTOR driver to Incus. All aspects of the LINSTOR driver in Incus are properly documented, and I especially like the ‘Terminology’ section as it elegantly summarizes LINBIT’s object model. This is all very welcome news.
Moving to the latest LINBIT content while sticking to a related theme, LINBIT Solutions Architect Matt Kereczman recently wrote, ‘Exploring LINBIT Software Relationships for Building Resilient, Scalable, & Integrated Data Storage Solutions’ for the LINBIT blog.
Within the post, Matt explains that some users may feel overwhelmed with LINBIT software documentation, source code repositories, blogs, and platform-specific integration materials, but he demonstrates why the collection is necessary. The bottom line is that it provides LINBIT software users flexibility and control over their mission-critical storage infrastructure. That is one of the key intentions that we have when developing our software.
We’ve also released a new Knowledge Base article: ‘DRBD Kernel Module Compatibility.’ It provides information about how our developers build the DRBD kernel module for compatibility with different Linux kernels, explaining why there sometimes might be problems with building for kernels on certain systems, and showing what you can do to try to resolve problems.
Regarding new software updates, we recently released WinDRBD 1.1.20, drbd-utils v9.31.0, python-linstor/linstor-client 1.25.3(3), linstor-server 1.31.0, LINSTOR Operator v2.8.1, linstor-proxmox v8.1.1, and LINSTOR GUI v1.9.4.
