An Enlightened Approach to LINSTOR
Here at LINBIT®, we live at the command prompt, but on occasion, getting a graphical view of things can be enlightening, so we have developed a new graphical interface for LINSTOR® that is now available to our customers with a brand new and exciting interface.
Reasons for Using the LINBIT GUI
The LINBIT GUI allows you to view complex LINSTOR environments quickly and provides administrators who are unfamiliar with working from the command line in Linux to promptly observe the status of deployments without the need to ‘ssh’ into the controller node and then run CLI commands. The GUI allows the deployment of new resources and editing of existing resources. You can easily take control over your NFS, iSCSI, NVMe-oF targets, and much more.
Installing the LINBIT GUI
For existing LINSTOR customers, installing the LINBIT GUI is as simple as using your distribution’s package manager to get up and running in just a few moments. From your controller node, execute the appropriate command below to install the latest version of the LINBIT GUI. Your repositories should already be configured to provide access to our servers.
For RHEL and related Linux distributions:
dnf -y install linstor-gui
For apt-based systems such as Debian or Ubuntu:
apt install linstor-gui
The installation should only take a few seconds. Once the package has been installed, the GUI is ready to go. No additional actions are required.
Using the LINBIT GUI
Using the LINBIT GUI is as simple as opening up your favorite browser then connecting to the LINSTOR controller node where you performed the installation. First, open your web browser and navigate to:
http://<CONTROLLER_IP>:3370/ui/
You will be taken to the “Dashboard” that provides a quick overview of your cluster.
If you require a language other than English, we currently support eight languages in the LINBIT GUI: English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Russian. Just select the desired language from the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner.
From the Dashboard, you can select any option from the left-hand menu to navigate to the appropriate page to view your inventory and your software-defined resources. You can see a list of your nodes showing the controller and the satellites in this view. In addition, you can view and set properties for all of the nodes in your LINSTOR cluster, also providing a quick view of the node status within the cluster.
The “Nodes” section also allows you to add or remove nodes from the cluster easily.
Most pages allow you to view and set properties for the nodes or resources, which can be very convenient, especially if you are unfamiliar with all available properties. However, we do not suggest changing properties unless you are familiar with the resulting changes! If you are unsure, check resources like the LINSTOR User’s Guide or the LINBIT Community Slack message board.
The LINBIT GUI also supports managing properties for the controller node.
Benefits of the LINBIT GUI
Providing your administrators with an additional tool to manage the cluster is a great benefit, especially in environments with administrators that may not be familiar with Linux or working from the command line. Productivity does not have to wait for an administrator to climb a CLI learning curve, as drop-down menu navigation and dashboard status representations are intuitive. Did I mention that it is available to LINBIT customers for the low, low price of free? It’s a great tool to make available to your staff.
The LINBIT GUI in action!
Here are some additional examples of the GUI for your viewing pleasure.
