I recently returned from the STAC Summit, where I presented ‘Fast Data Replication with DRBD over RDMA/RoCE/IB/verbs’ as part of the ‘Innovation Roundup.’ The challenge at STAC is that every vendor presentation gets a 5-minute time slot. I was quite relieved after 4:20 that I said everything I wanted to say without feeling rushed. I saw big-name vendors getting cut off somewhere in the middle of their presentations. I call it a successful event for LINBIT.
Last week, Rene and I were at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference. I will share some insight about this event in my following newsletter. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, as I occasionally share my thoughts there, too.
In addition to speaking events, other team members have been working on new blog posts. Since I last wrote, the team published a piece titled, The Benefits of Buying Support for Open Source Software. Open Source Software is often thought to be free. In some cases, that is true. However, this blog post provides valuable insight into the various benefits of buying support for open-source software.
The main takeaway is that we can do more for our customers when they invest in support, which helps improve our services and ultimately improve our client’s businesses. When our customers are committed to their success, the potential of our software and overall capabilities are enormous.
Regarding software updates, linstor-server 1.25.1 fixes two bugs. The first bug fix is that linstor showed a warning in the storage pool list for offline nodes. The second fix is that old satellites should show as VERSION_MISMATCH. The next feature release (1.26) is planned for the second week of December.
Secondly, drbd-reactor v1.4.0 is a minor bug fix release, improving how it works on machines where IPv6 is disabled via the kernel command line and that it no longer needs to be restarted after upgrading the drbd kernel driver.
Another important release is a new version of LINBIT VSAN. LINBIT VSAN is a product of LINBIT that is slightly different from all the others. It targets GUI-only users. It bundles Alma-Linux, LINSTOR, DRBD-rector, DRBD, iSCSI Target software, and an NFS server into one easy-to-deploy package. You can get it as an .ISO for deployments on physical servers or as an .OVA file for deployment on virtual machines. An HTML5 front-end takes you through all configuration steps, from discovering the nodes on the network through discovering storage devices to defining highly available iSCSI targets and NFS exports.
LINBIT VSAN is a compilation of many of LINBIT’s technologies in an easy-to-use package for those who are not command-line wizards. Mostly, it is used for building highly available storage for VMware deployments.
The most significant change in this new release of LINBIT VSAN is that we switched the iSCSI target software from LIO to SCST. LIO is the target software that comes with the upstream Linux kernel. SCST is an out-of-tree maintained iSCSI target implementation.
We learned that the LIO does not work perfectly in specific load situations, which surprised us, as we generally expect software components that come with upstream Linux to work. Moreso, as LIO is also a supported component of the RHEL Linux distributions. SCST replaces that and does not suffer from the mentioned issues.
The final aspect I want to mention is that LINBIT VSAN requires three nodes. That might sound like a limitation, as others in this field pretend to work with only two machines. I need to point out that the 3rd node can be as small as a Raspberry Pi.
