Highly Available Replicated Disk Drives for Windows
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.
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.
Architecture
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).
Use cases
Since WinDRBD is both application agnostic and file system agnostic many different use cases are imaginable:
- Implement highly available Windows servers. For example highly available MSSQL database servers
- WinDRBD network boot: System volume (“C:”) over WinDRBD. To implement highly available centrally managed Windows clients WinDRBD here works as a replacement for iSCSI.
- Disaster recovery for Windows Clients. By using zfs / lvm snapshots on Linux peers, Windows storage can be rolled back in case of malware infection.
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