As we lay out our plans for work on the new features on the DRBD and LINSTOR sides, there are some interesting improvements to share from LINSTOR GUI.
First, the views on resource definitions, resources, and volumes were modeled along the data structures, which was not ideal. Now, it has a condensed view that combines more information and removes uninteresting details. With the new view, you can expand each resource definition and see the nodes on which it has resources.
However, the most outstanding improvement is how it shows the relevant LINSTOR aux properties if the window size is wide enough. In the screenshot, you see the human-readable internal names of CloudStack. They are more meaningful than the LINSTOR/DRBD resource names containing the CloudStack volume UUID. Similarly, it displays those human-readable names in a Proxmox VE setup.

Over to the latest LINBIT content, ‘A DRBD & LINSTOR Overview from the Creator of DRBD’ – the creator being myself – is a YouTube post that overviews how DRBD and its companion software-defined storage solution, LINSTOR (also open source), help protect data and keep services up and running.
This presentation is taken from the 2024 Q4 LINBIT Community Meeting, which focused on Apache CloudStack and integrating LINSTOR with CloudStack for persistent storage and high availability within CloudStack. The meeting also featured ShapeBlue Cloud Architect Andrija Panic, who delivered ‘An Expert’s Introduction to Apache CloudStack.’
The final two videos I’ll share include LINBIT developer Rene Peinthor presenting on the topic of encryption with ‘Encrypting Apache CloudStack Disk Offerings’ from the same Community Meeting and LINBIT software engineer Moritz Wanzenböck providing a ‘LINBIT CloudStack HCI Demo.’
Continuing to recent blogs, ‘Open Source Innovations & Solutions at LINBIT’ reiterates our commitment to open source, sharing various projects and revealing our company’s philosophy and core values. This post complements ‘Building the Community at LINBIT,’ the latest newsletter from LINBIT COO Brian Hellman. He covers how we selected our community communications platform, our updated company core values, and how goals have evolved over the years at LINBIT.
Moving onto more technical blog posts, ‘Managing AWS EBS Volumes Using LINSTOR,’ was written by a LINBIT Solution Architect, and it shows how you can enable multi-AZ resiliency without sacrificing performance in the cloud.
‘Shared-Nothing High-Availability Architecture with DRBD’ talks about how DRBD and a complimentary cluster resource manager, such as DRBD Reactor, can help you create a shared-nothing HA cluster. ‘GitLab High Availability With DRBD & Pacemaker’ guides readers through all the required steps to install and configure a highly available GitLab environment with DRBD and Pacemaker.
Finally, ‘Load Balanced Replication with DRBD’ shows how, along with the ability to encrypt replication traffic, DRBD version 9.2.6 allows you to load balance replication traffic across multiple TCP sockets.
Before I sign off on this edition, I want to share the latest software updates. Since I last wrote before Christmas, the team has released linstor-server 1.30.2, python-linstor/linstor-client 1.24.0, drbd-reactor v1.7.0, and LINSTOR GUI v1.8.9.