Empower Your Virtualization Stack
with LINBIT SDS for Proxmox VE
Why Integrate LINBIT SDS in Proxmox VE
Organizations managing virtualized environments often encounter difficulties in providing seamless access to both structured and unstructured data across multiple virtual machines and containers, all while controlling storage costs. Open source software-defined storage (SDS) solutions and virtualization management platforms help by abstracting storage services from underlying hardware, simplifying deployment and management.
However, this abstraction can introduce complexities in accessing data consistently and efficiently within virtualized environments. The LINBIT SDS solution for Proxmox VE addresses these challenges by using familiar block storage technologies to deliver reliable, transparent storage solutions that integrate smoothly with virtualized environments. This approach ensures easy, customizable, and performant data access within complex virtualized infrastructures.
Use Cases
Integrating LINBIT SDS with Proxmox VE creates an ideal environment for cloud providers, hosting companies, organizations in the financial sector, and ISPs. Application focused operations need performance, simplicity, and flexibility from a storage system. LINBIT SDS and its enterprise support provide this, while offering resiliency for data that applications and workloads depend on.
Proxmox VE and LINBIT SDS (LINSTOR and DRBD) are powerful tools for building private cloud deployments. Here are a few examples of how they can be used together:
Use Case 1
Hosting Web Applications with Persistent Storage Needs
Use Proxmox VE and LINSTOR together to build and host performance oriented web applications. Use Proxmox VE to spin up VMs while LINSTOR dynamically provisions the necessary storage. Live migrate VMs with no downtime as a side effect.
Use Case 2
Disaster Recovery (DR) with Multi-Site Capabilities
Proxmox VE supports disaster recovery (DR) architectures by using LINSTOR volume snapshots and snapshot shipping features, or by using LINSTOR to implement a stretched cluster. These setups can give you DR options within a Proxmox VE environment, without having to rely on the concepts of zones and regions.
Use Case 3
High-Performance Computing (HPC) Platforms
Proxmox VE and LINSTOR combine to create highly available and reliable HPC platforms that can service CPU and I/O intensive virtualized or containerized workloads, such as databases used in analytics, forecasting, simulation, and modeling.
Business Benefits
Enhanced Flexibility and Scalability
Support organizational growth and easily scale or change your storage by using LINSTOR, without disrupting running workloads.
24x7 High Availability
Minimize downtime by using LINSTOR and DRBD to ensure continuous and synchronous data replication.
Rock Solid Replication
Build resilient applications with time-tested and battle-proven DRBD storage replication, used in production systems worldwide.
Low TCO with High Performance
LINBIT open source software cuts costs and boosts high availability performance without sacrificing features.
Proxmox & LINSTOR Architecture
LINSTOR integrates with Proxmox VE by using a LINBIT-developed open source Proxmox storage plugin. This integration enables automatic provisioning, monitoring, and scaling of storage resources, ensuring optimal performance and reliability for virtualized or containerized applications in Proxmox.
The LINSTOR system consists of multiple server and client components:
– A LINSTOR controller manages the configuration of the LINSTOR cluster and all of its managed storage resources.
– The LINSTOR satellite component manages the creation, modification, and deletion of storage resources on each node that provides or uses storage resources managed by LINSTOR.
All communication between LINSTOR components uses TCP/IP and can be secured using SSL/TLS.
You can configure data replication traffic to use either TCP/IP or RDMA.
After integrating LINSTOR with Proxmox, you can assign LINSTOR storage to Proxmox managed VMs from within the Proxmox GUI.
Deployment Architectures
Hyperconverged
Direct attached storage in a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) architecture provides great performance while also enabling HA by using DRBD synchronous replication.
Disaggregated Storage
Separate your storage from compute to scale each individually. The DRBD kernel module and LINSTOR satellite process will bridge compute to storage over the network by using DRBD client (diskless) access mode.
Storage Virtualization
Use LINSTOR Gateway to deploy LINBIT SDS as a virtual appliance within the hypervisor cluster, and share the now HA storage back out as NFS, iSCSI, or NVMe-oF network attached storage.
Resources
Proxmox Documentation
Official instructions for deploying LINSTOR with Proxmox.
Proxmox
Partner Page
Hear from partners about their integration experience.
LINSTOR
Documentation
Deep dive into LINSTOR's architecture and functionalities.
LINBIT Forum
Deep dive into LINSTOR's architecture and functionalities.
