There are many workload orchestrators for virtual machines on Linux. The open-source options are Apache CloudStack, OpenNebula, Xen Orchestra, oVirt, OpenStack, Proxmox VE, and Ganeti. I know of seven orchestrators, for which there are only six integrations to LINBIT SDS. A seventh isn’t required because OpenStack and oVirt share the same interface for storage integration – Cinder.
For all the others, LINBIT has to develop a unique integration. Some of the interfaces are not programming-language agnostic. For the above set, we have Java, Python, and Perl5. I do not dare to think about how many more interfaces and programming languages are necessary to cover the proprietary VM orchestrators.
On the container side, I am only aware of Kubernetes, Nomad, Docker Swarm, and Incus. The former two have a common interface – the Container Storage Interface (CSI). The OSS community develops/maintains the integrations with Docker Swarm and Incus. Most integrations are not large software projects, but the burden of maintaining integrations (including continuous testing) seems unbounded as the number of integrations grows.
I want to highlight the trend of using Kubernetes to manage virtual machines. Technically, it is the KubeVirt project. The major players in the market are Red Hat with OpenShift Virtualization, SUSE Virtualization, Alauda, and Cozystack from Aenix. There are probably more I am unaware of. The nice thing with those is that they leverage the CSI driver as the backing orchestrator is Kubernetes.
IDEs/editors have a similar problem with programming languages. There are too many combinations (=integrations). They now have the language server protocol (LSP) interface, which reduces the immense matrix to one interface! Awesome!
I have a request for the industry: adopt the CSI for all your orchestrators! It is language agnostic and packaged as a container – a good fit for all. And spoiler: unlike our proprietary competitors, LINBIT supports live migration for VMs running with KubeVirt in Kubernetes!
Moving on to some recent happenings at LINBIT, members from our US team attended SCaLE 22x in California earlier this month. They captured a glowing review of our software and customer support from Brian Monroe, a former employee of one of our customers and an ambassador for the Fedora Project.
Concerning new LINBIT content, I can now share all three videos from our recent Community Meeting. In ‘An Overview of WinDRBD & a Preview of LINSTOR for Windows’ LINBIT lead developer, Johannes Khoshnazar-Thoma, presents a high-level overview of the software while demonstrating how to build the project locally. He provides a preview of LINSTOR for Windows and discusses some of the choices made when testing and developing WinDRBD.
The second video from the Community Meeting is ‘Resync Without Replication: Reducing DRBD Data Resynchronization Times,’ in which LINBIT developer Joel Colledge showcases how the DRBD feature – resync without replication – reduces DRBD resynchronization times. This feature will be available with the release of DRBD 9.3.
The third and final Community Meeting video is ‘LINSTOR on Talos Linux: A Robust Base for Cozystack,’ which features special guest Andrei Kvapil, founder of Ænix. In the video, he overviews Cozystack and speaks to his experiences selecting, deploying, and using LINSTOR within Cozystack.
We also released a new blog post. ‘Documenting a LINSTOR Automatic Resource Placement Feature: Ensuring a Number of Resources on Nodes of a Different Type,’ by LINBIT Documentation Specialist Michael Troutman, provides insight into our LINSTOR User’s Guide documentation process.
Regarding new software updates, we have released LINSTOR Gateway v1.8.0, LINSTOR GUI v1.9.3, python-linstor/linstor-client 1.25.0, and Drbd-9.2.13 since I last wrote.
