Highly Available Replicated Disk Drives for Windows
Connecting a Windows WinDRBD® resource with a Linux storage server enables you to benefit from features like LVM snapshots or zfs storage pools also on the Windows platforms.
LINBIT High Availability (HA) For Windows
LINBIT has ported its Linux based high availability (HA) stack to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems (Windows Server 2016, 2019 and 2022, Windows 10 and 11). This stack consists of following open source components:
- WinDRBD: A native Windows kernel driver based on DRBD that provides highly available (HA) virtual disks to applications and file systems
- LINSTOR For Windows: A software-defined storage (SDS) solutionmiddleware for managing DRBD and WinDRBD resources
- LINBIT Cluster Manager for Windows: A light-weight application aware cluster manager based on DRBD Reactor that comes preconfigured for common server applications such as MS SQL Server, Hyper-V and SMB Ffile Sservers
Optional features include cross platform replication for mixed Windows and /Linux clusters, disaster recovery (DR) using DRBD Proxy as well as a web browser based graphical user interface (Web-GUI) for easy configuration and maintenance of the cluster.
Use Cases
Database
- Microsoft SQL Server
-
MySQL
-
Oracle DB
-
PostgreSQL
- Redis
Application Stacks
- SAP DB Clusters
- Web Servers
- Database Servers
- Email Servers
- And more!
File Servers
- CIFS
- FTP
-
Hyper-V
(virtualization technology)
Storage Targets
- iSCSI
- Fibre Channel
-
Flash Cache
- NVMe-oF
- And more!
Architecture
WinDRBD is the port of Linbit’s DRBD kernel driver and userspace utilities to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems (Windows Server, Windows 10). It is based on the original source code of DRBD, which makes it widely compatible with the Linux version of DRBD. Most features that come with Linux DRBD are also available on the WinDRBD port. In addition, WinDRBD can be used for booting a Windows client from a network resource.
Technically, the WinDRBD Windows driver consists of a thin Linux compatibility layer that emulates the Linux kernel APIs used by the DRBD driver for the Windows platform. Inside this layer, the original DRBD engine (with a few compiler-specific patches) is working. To control the kernel driver the original DRBD user space utilities (drbdadm, drbdsetup and drbdmeta) are used. They are ported using the CygWin POSIX emulation library which is also included in the WinDRBD package (so there is no need to install CygWin alongside WinDRBD).
