After almost 5 years in the making, LINBIT® announces the official launch of WinDRBD® 1.0.0.
Vienna 8th of February 2022: LINBIT, the company behind the storage replication technology DRBD® and the LINSTOR® storage orchestration solution, announced the release of the stable version 1.0.0 of WinDRBD. WinDRBD is the port of the DRBD Linux kernel driver and user space utilities to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It allows one to build high availability (HA) clusters on Windows Server and Client platforms.
WinDRBD provides its storage volumes as regular SCSI disks, making it compatible with most Windows applications. As it is a kernel driver, applications like Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Hyper-V can be made highly available in a cluster of Windows nodes.
WinDRBD is wire compatible with the Linux version, so one can also build mixed setups replicating data between Linux and Windows machines. In addition, WinDRBD enables booting Windows clients from one or more Linux servers, thereby realizing diskless thin clients running on Windows 10 (and in the future Windows 11).
Quotes:
Philipp Reisner, CEO of LINBIT, says: “I am proud and glad that WinDRBD reaches the 1.0 milestone.Â
This is an important step in the journey. One of the next steps will bring LINSTOR to the Windows platform as well.”.
Johannes Thoma, the developer of WinDRBD explains: “The Linux kernel compatibility layer allows us to use the original Linux DRBD sources inside the Windows NT kernel. With this layer, we are able to always use the most recent DRBD sources for WinDRBD. It implements kernel mechanisms such as threads, wait queues, spinlocks and a network socket API. Therefore, this compatibility layer may as well be used to port other drivers from Linux to Windows.” Read Johannes’ mailing list announcement in its original statement here.
About LINBIT:
LINBIT is the force behind DRBD, the de-facto open source standard for High Availability (HA) software, and LINSTOR, which manages data storage for enterprise virtualization and cloud computing. The LINBIT DRBD software is deployed in millions of mission-critical environments worldwide to provide High Availability (HA), Geo Clustering for Disaster Recovery (DR). LINSTOR is the base for Software Defined Storage (SDS) for many cloud orchestration systems like Kubernetes, OpenStack, ApacheCloudStack, OpenNebula, XCP-ng, and Proxmox VE based clouds.
About WinDRBD:
WinDRBD® is the port of LINBIT`s DRBD kernel driver and user space utilities to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems (Windows Server, Windows 10). It is based on the original source code of DRBD, which makes it widely compatible with the Linux version of DRBD. Most features that come with Linux DRBD are also available on the WinDRBD port. In addition, WinDRBD can be used for booting a Windows client from a network resource. You can download the exe-file here.
