First, I want to mention that Red Hat released OpenShift 4.22. This relates to LINBIT because with this release, Red Hat made the Two-Node OpenShift with Fencing (TNF) feature generally available. And this TNF can leverage LINBIT SDS for shared-nothing clustering. This release is of interest to organizations that run such small clusters, in many locations, such as a retailer running a cluster in each store.
Another angle for solving the same challenge of operating many two-node clusters is automatic provisioning of (virtualized) quorum/witness nodes. We have been running this project for some time, but with the Linstor 1.35 release, planned for early August, this should also become available.
In response to market demands, another project we are currently working on completing is LINBIT SDS support for shared storage. I am sure this is driven by organizations moving away from the VMWare platform. However, some of these organizations are unable to replace the hardware they bought for running VMware at the same time. Therefore, they require that their future software stack works with their existing SAN infrastructure. We are working to complete support for shared storage across our stacks, for ApacheCloudStack and Kubernetes.
I can also share that by the end of the summer, we will have a major update for DRBD’s RDMA transport. Early lab results show a 4.7x performance increase for streaming workloads.
Moving on to the latest LINBIT content, we’ve created and published a new blog post about LINBIT’s new deployment tool. ‘Getting Started with the LINBIT Deployment Tool,’ shows how our new graphical tool makes installing and configuring LINSTOR in a cluster of nodes easier than ever before.
For visual learners out there, you can watch LINBIT COO Brian Hellman providing a demo on the LINBIT deployment tool in our recent Community Meeting, the entirety of which you can watch here. If you feel ready to experiment with the deployment tool, you can download it here.
Another edit from the recent LINBIT Community Meeting is ‘Implementing NFS-Ganesha in LINSTOR Gateway for Creating Multiple HA NFS Exports,’ in which LINBIT developer, Christoph Böhmwalder, describes an implementation feature coming to LINSTOR Gateway.
Back to blog posts, we also recently published ‘Securing the LINSTOR REST API with Token Authentication.’ The post provides insight into how LINSTOR 1.34 introduced bearer token authentication, which is a straightforward way to restrict access to its REST API.
I’ll complete this content roundup by sharing three recent Knowledge Base articles the team has published. You can learn about ‘Installing the LINSTOR Python API Client Library.’ ‘Auditing TRIM Behavior Across File System, DRBD, and LVM Layers,’ and ‘Emulating 512 Byte Sectors on 4K Native Backing Storage over iSCSI’ by visiting the provided links.
Regarding the latest software updates, since I last wrote, the team has released LINBIT SDS 1.0.2 and WinDRBD 1.2.10 as well as the aforementioned deployment tool.
