GitLab High Availability With DRBD & Pacemaker
GitLab is a DevOps platform that many organizations and developers rely on around the clock, nearly every day of the year. You can install it as a self-managed, standalone web application, but a single instance is always a single point of failure. This article guides you through installing and configuring a highly available (HA) GitLab […]
Using Volume Group Snapshots with LINSTOR in Kubernetes
Version 2.10.0 of the LINSTOR® Operator for Kubernetes, developed by LINBIT®, introduces support for volume group snapshots, a feature that enables crash-consistent, point-in-time snapshots of multiple persistent volumes simultaneously. Kubernetes 1.36 promoted the VolumeGroupSnapshot API to General Availability (GA) under the groupsnapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1 API group. Before volume group snapshots, a Kubernetes operator could only take snapshots of one persistent […]
Becoming More Accessible to Windows Users
I have recently seen two internal presentations on LINBIT SDS for Windows. The first was about Hyper-V virtual machines running with their virtualized backing disks on WinDRBD, the VMs managed by drbd-reactor, and a live migration controlled by drbd-reactor. The second demonstration was about MS SQL Server Express, also running on a WinDRBD volume, and made […]
LINSTOR in OpenShift: A Red Hat Certified OperatorHub Offering
The LINSTOR® Operator for managing the LINSTOR life cycle in Kubernetes is a Red Hat certified offering available through the OperatorHub in the OpenShift Container Platform. An Operator is a Kubernetes pattern that uses Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and Kubernetes principles such as the control loop to automate tasks. You might think of an Operator […]
Creating ReadWriteMany Persistent Volumes in Kubernetes by using LINSTOR
With the release of LINSTOR® Operator 2.10.0 for Kubernetes, users can create ReadWriteMany (RWX) Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) directly using the LINSTOR Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. This feature enables multiple pods to mount and write to the same LINSTOR-backed persistent volume simultaneously. RWX support is a hard requirement for applications that require shared storage, […]
Running a Local LLM in Kubernetes with vLLM & LINSTOR
Running large language model (LLM) workloads in-house rather than consuming them through managed API services is a growing trend. Managed API services are convenient, but token costs grow quickly at scale, latency can be unpredictable, and routing sensitive data through public endpoints raises compliance concerns. A hybrid approach (running open source models locally for high-volume […]
Using DRBD to Build a Reliable & High-performing 2-node HA Solution
Since 2024, LINBIT® has partnered with the open source-focused enterprise data storage, compute, and virtualization solutions company, 45Drives. This partnership helps 45Drives bring a high-performing, low-resource consuming, block storage-based 2-node high availability (HA) solution to their customers. Their HA solution based on DRBD® is a middle ground between their single-node ZFS offering and the resource […]
Claude, Anthropic’s Mythos, & a Potential Danger
Once more, I am writing about AI. By now, I have become a nearly daily user of Claude Code. I have learned how to work with it. I learned to structure the work so that my LLM agent does not run into the Context Rot problem. Maintaining the CLAUDE.md file. Every time it makes a […]
Working to Put DRBD 9 in the Mainline Linux Kernel
The LINBIT® team has been busy for more than a year on development work that could put DRBD® 9 in the mainline Linux kernel, possibly as soon as the Linux 7.2 release sometime in September or October 2026. The current version of the DRBD kernel module in the mainline Linux kernel is 8.4.11. While the […]
Merging DRBD-9.3 into the Linux Upstream
We are currently working on merging DRBD-9.3 into the Linux upstream. But how did we get here? DRBD-8.4 works only with a single peer; it is a software for two-node failover clusters. And the DRBD that comes with the upstream Linux is equivalent to drbd-8.4. The most recent release was 8.4.11, eight years ago. However, […]
