LINBIT® is a Diamond Sponsor of the CloudStack Collaboration Conference (CCC) 2026, happening 18-20 November in Edinburgh, Scotland. It has been a busy development year for the LINBIT team. As the VMware exodus continues to drive alternative virtualization platform adoption, the team works to help VMware refugees land comfortably on the storage side of operations. This article discusses LINBIT participation at CCC 2026 and highlights some of the LINBIT development work related to CloudStack and its integration with LINSTOR®, the LINBIT-developed software-defined storage (SDS) solution.
LINBIT sessions at CCC 2026
Two members of the LINBIT team will speak at CCC 2026: Philipp Reisner, DRBD® creator and LINBIT CEO, and Rene Peinthor, LINBIT lead developer for the LINSTOR CloudStack integration.
LINSTOR support for shared storage and Hyper-V in CloudStack
Reisner’s talk is titled “News From the LINSTOR + DRBD SDS Stack: Shared Storage and Hyper-V” and is scheduled for Friday, 20 November, 15:10-15:40. Reisner plans to give a short overview of the LINSTOR and DRBD architecture for QEMU/KVM hypervisors before going into details about two exciting upcoming features for the LINSTOR CloudStack plugin. One feature brings support for working with shared storage attached to KVM hypervisors. The other feature involves LINBIT SDS (LINSTOR and DRBD) for Windows, with Hyper-V support in the LINSTOR CloudStack plugin.
LINSTOR with CloudStack feature demonstration
Peinthor’s session is titled “New LINSTOR and LINSTOR-CloudStack Features Demonstrated” and is scheduled for Thursday, 19 November, 14:30-15:30. As the maintainer and LINBIT lead developer of the LINSTOR plugin in Apache CloudStack, Peinthor is deeply familiar with the platform and its integration with LINSTOR. The demonstration will focus on the latest LINSTOR and CloudStack integration features and community contributions to the project. You can read overviews of some of these features later in this article.
The state of LINSTOR in Apache CloudStack
The LINSTOR primary storage plugin is part of the upstream Apache CloudStack codebase. Apache CloudStack 4.16.0.0 (LTS), released in late 2021, was the first release to include the plugin. LINSTOR provisions volumes on request from the CloudStack management server and sets up replication with DRBD for KVM hosts. Using LINSTOR and DRBD helps support high availability of virtual machines (VMs) and VM live migrations. DRBD quorum prevents split-brain scenarios when CloudStack restarts a VM on another host, so CloudStack VM-HA works without IPMI fencing. DRBD also allows two primaries during a VM live migration. After the upstream project merges pull request 13910, an Apache CloudStack release can also use LINSTOR shared storage pools on SAN storage.
You can learn more about the LINSTOR integration with CloudStack in the LINSTOR User Guide.
Shared storage pool support
One of the most exciting 2026 LINBIT developments related to CloudStack is the open pull request 13910 that, when merged and included in a release, will bring LINSTOR support for shared storage pools to CloudStack users. Shared storage pool support is relevant to organizations that move from VMware to CloudStack and that have SAN storage. With this support, LINSTOR manages thick LVM volumes in a shared LVM volume group on a SAN LUN that all KVM hosts can access. On a shared storage pool, the data exists once on the LUN, and the pool has no DRBD layer. Outside of a live migration, a resource is active on at most one node at a time. The feature supports VM live migration by using the LINSTOR REST API 1.29 calls make-available (with auto_manage_dual_primary) and unmake-available.
You can read the LINBIT blog article, “Using Shared SAN Storage with LINSTOR in Kubernetes for KubeVirt Live Migration”, to learn how LINSTOR shared storage pools already work in Kubernetes.
Migrating into LINSTOR primary storage
Organizations that leave VMware for CloudStack also need to convert their VM disks and move them to CloudStack primary storage. Development work in 2026 made LINSTOR primary storage a destination for these disks.
Other contributors in the CloudStack community are working to support moving VMs from VMware directly to LINSTOR. The merged pull request 13656, by Andrija Panic, adds LINSTOR primary storage as a destination for VMware-to-KVM migrations in CloudStack. These migrations include warm migrations that use VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) to reduce downtime. Before this change, the CloudStack VMware import placed converted disks on NFS, local, or SharedMountPoint primary storage. This change targets Apache CloudStack 24.0.0, the release after 4.23 under the new CloudStack version numbering.
In current CloudStack releases, you can move CloudStack-imported VMs to LINSTOR with a second step. The merged pull request 12532, by Peinthor, added live migration from any primary storage to LINSTOR primary storage. With this change, you can move a running VM and its volumes from the primary storage that you used to import VM disks into CloudStack to LINSTOR without stopping the VM. You can use the same feature to move any running VM in a CloudStack cloud from another primary storage to LINSTOR. The change shipped in Apache CloudStack 4.20.3.0 and 4.22.1.0.
Peinthor has since opened pull request 14344 to fix this live migration for cases where LINSTOR does not place a copy of the volume on the target host. At the time of writing, this pull request is open.
Backup, snapshots, and data protection
Backup and snapshot options for VMs on LINSTOR primary storage also grew in 2026. The merged pull request 12796, by Abhisar Sinha, added NAS backup and restore support for LINSTOR primary storage in Apache CloudStack 4.22.1.0.
Peinthor built on this support with incremental backups. The merged pull request 14194 adds incremental NAS backups for VMs on LINSTOR, which were limited to full backups before this change. The merged pull request 13746 adds incremental snapshots on secondary storage for LINSTOR volumes, with the same settings that file-based KVM storage uses. The merged pull request 13486 fixes snapshot backup and restore for encrypted LINSTOR volumes, and keeps these snapshots encrypted on secondary storage.
The incremental backup and snapshot changes are on the milestone for Apache CloudStack 4.22.2, which is not released at the time of writing. The fix for encrypted volumes is already in Apache CloudStack 4.23.0.0.
Securing LINSTOR by using controller token authentication
If your security policy requires authenticated access to storage management APIs, LINSTOR now supports API tokens. Starting with version 1.34.0, the LINSTOR REST API accepts bearer tokens for authentication. The merged pull request 13470, by Peinthor, adds support for this authentication method to the CloudStack LINSTOR plugin. The change is in Apache CloudStack 4.23.0.0, and is on the milestone for 4.22.2. To configure token authentication in LINSTOR, refer to the LINSTOR User Guide.
Community and contributing
The LINSTOR plugin is part of the apache/cloudstack repository on GitHub, under the Apache License 2.0. In 2026, other members of the CloudStack community also contributed LINSTOR-related features and fixes, including the already-mentioned VMware migration work by Andrija Panic and the NAS backup work by Abhisar Sinha. To report a problem or to propose a change, open an issue or a pull request in the repository, or talk to the LINBIT team at CCC 2026.
Meet the LINBIT team at CCC 2026
LINBIT has sponsored CCC every year since 2021, and the team is excited to continue this tradition with CCC 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland, 18-20 November. Members of the LINBIT team will present and will meet attendees. They want to hear about challenges, take feature requests, learn what others might be working on, and share in the excitement of working in open source.
Rene Peinthor gives a feature demonstration on Thursday, 19 November, at 14:30. Philipp Reisner talks on Friday, 20 November, at 15:10. The CCC website has a full schedule of the conference.
If you cannot attend the event, you can always reach out to the LINBIT team to discuss high availability, disaster recovery, and software-defined storage.
