Setting Up Highly Available Storage for Proxmox Using LINSTOR & the LINBIT GUI

This article is a companion article to the “How to Setup LINSTOR on Proxmox VE”. Instructions in this article will guide you through installing and integrating LINSTOR® with Proxmox VE. However, rather than using the LINSTOR CLI client to set up LINSTOR, you will use the open source LINBIT GUI.

Some of the benefits of integrating LINSTOR with Proxmox are:

• Live migrations of virtual machines (VMs) and containers
• High availability (HA) for VMs and containers
• Full and up-to-date replicas of virtual disks on multiple nodes
• Flexibility to configure the replica count in your cluster
• Thin-provisioned volume snapshots and snapshot shipping for disaster recovery

The previously mentioned article goes into more detail and explanation about the steps to integrate LINSTOR with Proxmox. This article is really meant to get you up-and-running as quickly as possible, with just the bare amount of explanation or background information. If you find yourself wanting more information about the setup steps or the integration, refer to the earlier mentioned article or the Proxmox chapter of the LINSTOR User Guide.

Assumptions

The assumptions about your deployment environment are similar to the assumptions in the earlier mentioned “How to Setup LINSTOR on Proxmox VE” article. These are:

• You have a working Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) 8.x cluster with three nodes, proxmox-0, proxmox-1, and proxmox-2. This tutorial uses PVE version 8.2.4 with kernel 6.8.12-1-pve.
• Each node has an additional unused physical disk drive, /dev/vdb.
• You will install LINSTOR alongside Proxmox, that is, your Proxmox nodes will also be LINSTOR nodes.
• All commands that you might need to run within a CLI, for example, installing packages or working with a logical volume manager, are run under the root user account or prefixed with sudo.

Installing LINSTOR Alongside Proxmox

LINSTOR, and the other related LINBIT®-developed software used in this article are open source. You have the option of building LINSTOR and other related components from source code available in the various projects within the LINBIT GitHub repository. However, it is faster to install, and easier to upgrade, if you install the software from packages by using a package manager. On the Proxmox platform, you will use DEB packages and the apt package manager to install packages. If you are a LINBIT customer, just enable the drbd-9 LINBIT repository on your nodes, and then update your repositories by using an apt update command. If you are not a LINBIT customer but want to evaluate LINBIT software, you can contact the LINBIT team for an evaluation account.

Adding the LINBIT Public Proxmox Package Repository

Alternatively, you can add the LINBIT public package repository by entering the following commands on all your nodes:

wget -O /tmp/package-signing-pubkey.asc \
    https://packages.linbit.com/package-signing-pubkey.asc
gpg --yes -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/linbit-keyring.gpg \
    --dearmor /tmp/package-signing-pubkey.asc
PVERS=8 && echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/linbit-keyring.gpg] \
    http://packages.linbit.com/public/ proxmox-$PVERS drbd-9" \
    > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/linbit.list
apt update

❗ IMPORTANT: Set the $PVERS variable to your Proxmox VE major version number. In this example, that is 8 because Proxmox VE 8.2.4 is installed.

⚠️ WARNING: Although the LINBIT public package repository can be a great option for homelabs, testing, and non-production use, LINBIT does not offer any guarantees, support, or SLAs for the packages in the public repositories. For production or enterprise deployments, using the official LINBIT customer repositories is recommended.

Installing Low-Level Components

First, install some of the necessary low-level components that you will need before you install LINSTOR and the LINSTOR Proxmox plugin.

On all nodes in your cluster, enter the following command:

apt -y install proxmox-default-headers drbd-dkms drbd-utils

Installing LINSTOR Components

Next, install LINSTOR components by entering the following command on all nodes:

apt -y install linstor-controller linstor-satellite linstor-client

Start the LINSTOR satellite service on all nodes.

systemctl enable linstor-satellite --now

Start the LINSTOR controller service on one node only, proxmox-0.

systemctl enable linstor-controller --now

Disable the LINSTOR controller service on all other nodes:

systemctl disable linstor-controller --now

Installing the LINBIT GUI

If you are using LINBIT customer package repositories, then you can install the LINBIT GUI on all nodes by entering the following command:

apt -y install linstor-gui

Installing the LINBIT GUI from Source Code

If you are using the LINBIT public package repositories, you will need to install the LINBIT GUI from its open source codebase. At the time of writing, the software is not available as a package in the LINBIT Debian or Proxmox public package repositories.

To install the LINBIT GUI from the source code of the latest tagged release, enter the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/LINBIT/linstor-gui
cd linstor-gui/
git checkout v$(git describe --tags --abbrev=0 | sed 's/^v//')
make build
make install

❗ IMPORTANT: Installing linstor-gui from source code requires the npm package manager for Node.js and a version of Node.js greater than 14. You can verify the installed version of Node.js by entering a node -v command. Proxmox VE 8 repositories will have an adequate version of Node.js. On earlier versions, you might need to install an adequate version of Node.js manually.

Setting Up LINSTOR by Using the GUI

You can reach the GUI by opening the following URL in a web browser on the same network as your LINSTOR controller node: http://<LINSTOR-controller-node-hostname-or-IP-address>:3370.

In this article, proxmox-0 is the LINSTOR controller node and its IP address is 192.168.222.130.

Adding Nodes by Using the GUI

Before you can configure LINSTOR storage, you need to set up your LINSTOR cluster by defining the cluster nodes. Go to the “Node List” screen by expanding the “Inventory” menu item on the left side of the screen, then clicking on “Nodes”. At first, your LINSTOR deployment will have no defined nodes.

On the “Node List” screen, click the “Add” button to add a node to your cluster. This will take you to the “Create Node” screen. Here, you enter information about the node you want to add. For example, proxmox-0 for the name and 192.168.222.130 for its IP address. For the “Type” field, choose “Satellite”, “Controller”, or “Combined”, depending on the node’s role. In this article’s example deployment, proxmox-0 runs LINSTOR satellite and controller services, so it has a “Combined” role in the cluster. The other two nodes are LINSTOR satellite nodes.

When you finish defining nodes in your cluster, the “Node List” screen will show summary information for them.

Adding Storage Pools

After defining the nodes in your LINSTOR cluster, you can configure LINSTOR-managed storage. The GUI allows you to create storage pools with some extra convenience. Unlike the LINSTOR CLI client, for example, you can create the same storage pool on multiple nodes using a single input form, rather than executing multiple CLI commands.

Navigate to the “Storage Pool List” screen by clicking the “Storage Pools” item from within the “Inventory” menu item on the left side of the GUI. In a new LINSTOR deployment, the screen will list only the default “diskless” storage pool on all your LINSTOR satellite nodes.

Next, click the “Add” button on the “Storage Pool List” screen. This will bring you to a screen where you can define and create a new storage pool. You might complete the fields as follows:

• Storage Pool Name: pve-storage
• Multiple Nodes: toggle on
• Node: proxmox-0 proxmox-1 proxmox-2
• Type: LVM_THIN
• Device path: /dev/vdb

However, for the Proxmox use case in this guide, you need some free space head room with your storage pool. For this reason, you need to create an LVM volume group on all your storage cluster nodes by using the CLI, and then create a thin-provisioned logical volume that only uses 80% of your physical disk to leave some headroom. To do that, enter the following command on all the storage nodes in your cluster:

vgcreate linstor_vg /dev/vdb && \
lvcreate -l 80%FREE -T linstor_vg/thinpool

Output from the command will show that the volume group and the logical volume were created.

  Physical volume "/dev/vdb" successfully created.
  Volume group "linstor_vg" successfully created
  Thin pool volume with chunk size 64.00 KiB can address at most <15.88 TiB of data
  Logical volume "thinpool" created.

After creating an LVM volume group and thin pool logical volume on all your storage nodes, you can add a LINSTOR storage pool backed by this logical volume on all your nodes. If you are not on it already, return to the “Add Storage Pool” screen by expanding the “Inventory” menu item and clicking on “Storage Pools”. Click the “Add” button in the upper right corner. Next, click the “Existing Device” tab and complete the fields as follows:

• Storage pool name: pve-storage
• Node: proxmox-0, proxmox-1, proxmox-2
• Type: LVM_THIN
• Volume group: linstor_vg/thinpool

Click the “Submit” button after entering values into the fields.

After defining and creating the pve-storage storage pool on your LINSTOR satellite nodes, the “Storage Pool List” screen will show the new storage pool on these nodes.

Creating a LINSTOR Resource Group

After creating the same storage pool, pve-storage, on all your satellite nodes, you need to create a LINSTOR resource group. In this case, you will create a resource group that is backed by the storage pool that you just created. Later you will link this resource group to Proxmox when you configure the LINSTOR Proxmox integration plugin. This way, when you specify that Proxmox uses LINSTOR storage, for example, when you create a new virtual machine (VM), LINSTOR will create a new resource from the resource group, and deploy replicas of the resource in your cluster, all automatically and behind-the-scenes. Proxmox will then use this storage resource to store the VM disk image.

To create a LINSTOR resource group, expand the “Storage Configuration” menu item and click “Resource Groups”.

From the “Resource Group List” screen, click the “Add” button. Then, enter the following values in these fields:

• Name: pve-rg
• Description: Proxmox VE storage
• Storage Pool: pve-storage
• Place Count: 3

After entering the values, click the “Submit” button. LINSTOR will create the resource group and the associated LINSTOR volume group. After creating the resource group, the GUI will return to the “Resource Group List” page. The resource group list will show the new pve-rg resource group. You are now ready to install and configure the LINSTOR Proxmox integration plugin.

Installing the LINSTOR Proxmox VE Plugin

After defining and creating the necessary LINSTOR objects that you need for integrating LINSTOR with Proxmox, the next steps are to install and configure the LINSTOR Proxmox integration plugin. To install the LINSTOR Proxmox plugin, enter the following command on all your Proxmox nodes:

apt -y install linstor-proxmox

Configuring the LINSTOR Proxmox VE Plugin

After installing the LINSTOR Proxmox plugin, you need to configure it. Proxmox stores its storage configuration in the /etc/pve/storage.cfg file. Use the following command, or a text editor, to create the LINSTOR configuration:

On proxmox-0:

cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/pve/storage.cfg
drbd: linstor_storage
    content images, rootdir
    controller 192.168.222.130
    resourcegroup pve-rg
EOF

💡 TIP: You only need to edit the configuration file on one node. Proxmox will propagate the changes to the other Proxmox nodes in your cluster.

Within the configuration, you specify the Proxmox content type that you can use with LINSTOR storage, in this example VM images (images) and LXC container data (rootdir). You also specify the LINSTOR resource group and the LINSTOR controller node’s IP address. If you configured a highly available LINSTOR controller, you would specify the virtual IP address for the LINSTOR controller.

After editing the Proxmox storage configuration, restart Proxmox services in your cluster by entering the following command on all nodes:

systemctl restart pve-cluster pvedaemon pvestatd pveproxy pve-ha-lrm

Using LINSTOR Storage in Proxmox

That’s it. After creating a LINSTOR resource group for Proxmox storage and configuring the LINSTOR Proxmox plugin, you can use this HA storage just as you would any other compatible storage in Proxmox, for example, to store VM images or containers.

You can log in to the PVE web interface to investigate the LINSTOR integration.

Logging Into the Proxmox Web Interface

Log in to the PVE web interface by opening up the following URL, adjusted for your PVE host’s IP or DNS address, in a web browser: https://192.168.222.130:8006. Then enter your user name and password.

Showing LINSTOR Storage in the Proxmox Web Interface

After logging in to the Proxmox web interface, if you click the expansion arrow symbols before each Proxmox node shown within the “Server View” pane, you will find linstor_storage listed as available storage for each node.

You can use your LINSTOR storage to store your virtual machine images, just as you would any other storage in Proxmox. To do this, when you create a new VM, select linstor_storage in the “Storage” field on the “Disks” tab of the “Create: Virtual Machine” pop-up.

After you create a VM in Proxmox that uses LINSTOR storage, as mentioned earlier, LINSTOR will automatically create a storage resource associated with the VM and replicate the resource on all the nodes in your cluster. In this case, this is because you specified a placement count of 3 for the resource group you associated with Proxmox and because there are three storage nodes in your cluster. You can use the GUI to confirm this, by navigating to the “Resource List” screen.

Migrating Virtual Machines in Proxmox

If your VM does not have an attached virtual CD or DVD disc drive with an active ISO image, you can migrate your VM backed by LINSTOR storage from node to node, if you needed to. This might be something you would want to do when performing system maintenance tasks on a node. For added flexibility, and to minimize downtime for your VM users, you can also configure Proxmox high availability for your VM. To do this, with your VM selected, click the “More” button in the upper-right part of the screen and select “Manage HA” from the drop-down menu.

After adding a VM to Proxmox HA management, your VM will be automatically recovered on a healthy node in the PVE cluster should the VM’s original host fail. Because LINSTOR storage facilitates perfect, in real-time (synchronous) data replication through DRBD®, all nodes in this example setup will have an up-to-date copy of the VM’s virtual disk.

Next Steps and Other Resources

Hopefully this article has demonstrated some of the convenience and utility of using the LINBIT GUI to configure LINSTOR storage. LINBIT Solutions Architect, Ryan Ronnander, created an excellent video about integrating LINSTOR with Proxmox: “How to Set Up LINSTOR on Proxmox VE”. Watching the video starting at the “Creating a VM with LINSTOR Storage” chapter, would be great companion learning piece to this article. In the video, Ryan shows how to create an example VM in Proxmox, make the VM highly available, and demonstrates VM migration and failover. For other next steps, you might investigate how to make the LINSTOR controller service highly available in your cluster.

If you have any questions or issues integrating LINSTOR with Proxmox VE, the LINBIT Community Forums is a great place to ask for help from the community of LINBIT software users. You can also reach out to the LINBIT team if you might have questions about deploying LINSTOR with Proxmox in a production or enterprise environment, or if you want to evaluate LINBIT software for your use case using LINBIT prebuilt customer packages.