LINBIT

We've just released the new feature release 2.11.0 of our Kubernetes Operator. The Operator itself gained support for limiting the number of concurrent evacuations using the new key (click on the link below for more details). It also now allows passing arguments to lvcreate, zpool create, etc... on storage pool creation. On the new component feature front, we have added support for consistency groups in volumes. This ensures that in the event of node failures, a workload using multiple volumes at once sees a consistent state of the data on the new host after failover. We also implemented optional Quality of Service settings for volumes. These require an NRI plugin that enforces the necessary limits on Pod startup. We also have the usual round of improvements and bug fixes by updating our components. LINSTOR itself should be faster to start up on first deployment. LINSTOR CSI should be more robust when validating RWX modes, along with the usual dependency updates. We have also updated the DRBD release to 9.3.3, making this the first release using the 9.3 branch. This means we will no longer support RHEL7 and clones for our Operator going forward. https://hubs.ly/Q04s3rXc0

Our Kubernetes newsletter by Moritz Tanner provides Kubernetes content and software updates every couple of months, and this was the last one in case you missed it. The next one should be our early September 👀 https://hubs.ly/Q04rXlqw0

July had some significant software releases 👀 drbd-9.3.3 and drbd-9.2.19 fixed a surprisingly large number of bugs across the board, which you can read about in detail here: https://hubs.ly/Q04rCv0P0 LINSTOR Gateway v2.3.0 supports LINSTOR API token authentication and includes the LINSTOR Gateway version in the `/status` REST API response. (91601b9): https://hubs.ly/Q04rCyBm0 linstor-server 1.34.1 is the first bug fix release of the 1.34 branch, which you can read about in detail here: https://hubs.ly/Q04rCzdy0 LINBIT SDS For Windows 1.0.3 comes with WinDRBD 1.2.12 which (amongst other fixes) allows users to directly attach a WinDRBD disk to Hyper-V VMs also on Server 2022 and 2025 hypervisors. Furthermore it is packaged with LINSTOR Server 1.34.0, LINSTOR GUI 2.5.0 and LINSTOR client 1.28.1: https://hubs.ly/Q04rCz2m0 LINSTOR Operator 2.10.8 is the latest patch release for our Kubernetes Operator. This time, the Operator was enhanced to first check if the storage pools are set up before issuing the related LINSTOR commands, providing nicer error messages in case the devices are missing or pools not set up: https://hubs.ly/Q04rCwwn0 drbd-reactor v1.12.0 is here too. The focus of this cycle was on the drbd-reactorctl management tool and on more robust core behavior: https://hubs.ly/Q04rCBjT0

Our latest Kubernetes roundup is now on the blog 👇 https://hubs.ly/Q04r6RzF0 Please note that we have since released a new version of Operator, which you can see here - https://hubs.ly/Q04r6J4V0

See how LINSTOR served ANIO Solutions GmbH, an IT services company based in Vienna 💪 https://hubs.ly/Q04r74zW0

In this video, WinDRBD lead developer Johannes Khoshnazar-Thoma gives an overview of LINBIT SDS for Windows, an open source solution for creating software-defined storage (SDS) and high availability (HA) solutions in Windows 💯 LINBIT SDS for Windows runs on standard Windows Server editions and uses WinDRBD, which is built on the long-standing open source block-level replication technology for Linux, DRBD. Learn more here 👇 https://hubs.ly/Q04r6KPr0

Great things sometimes start with a crazy experiment. Before the AI age, many of us shelved crazy ideas as they were too time-consuming to explore or the purpose and benefits were unclear. Nowadays, before following these thoughts and finding reasons to park the idea, we can formulate a prompt to an AI-coding agent and see what happens.   WinDRBD re-uses the unpatched DRBD code as far as possible. It consists of a shim layer around the DRBD code that expects to run within the Linux kernel. In the case of WinDRBD, the shim layer bridges DRBD’s Linux expectations to the Windows kernel that hosts it.   Recently, my colleague Joel had the idea to use the same shim-layer approach to run DRBD as a userspace process on Linux. So you have one DRBD daemon that runs per node. If you want to do testing, you can run multiple such daemons and test a whole DRBD cluster on a single Linux host. But there is a lot more, like running it under the rich user-space tooling available for hunting down coding defects.   There are more possible applications. We could turn this into a user-space-only driver for Qemu. It would make deployment a lot simpler. Also updates! As I write this newsletter, it’s too early to tell if that is feasible, but it is currently stirring a lot of activity and experiments around it.   The igniting point was a very simple prompt to Claude code: Look at winDRBD, recreate that shim for the POSIX process API. AI is truly the enabler for crazy ideas.

The python-linstor package provides the Python client library used for interfacing with the LINSTOR REST API. Learn more about installing the LINSTOR Python API client library in our Knowledge Base article 💯 https://hubs.ly/Q04qPcBd0

Für unsere deutschsprachige Community: LINBIT ist Mitveranstalter des Open Tech Day 2026 in Nürnberg am 1. Oktober – gemeinsam mit der netways gmbh – und wir sind mit einem starken Line-up auf der Bühne vertreten. Mit dabei sind unter anderem: Philipp Reisner (LINBIT CEO & DRBD-Creator) – über hochverfügbare, softwaredefinierte Storage-Architekturen Yusuf Yildiz (Solution Architect, LINBIT)** – aus der Praxis zu Hochverfügbarkeit, Disaster Recovery und SDS - Moritz Tanner (Maintainer des Piraeus-Projekts, LINBIT) – zu Kubernetes, Container-Orchestrierung und Storage-Automatisierung Dazu kommen weitere Expert:innen von IBM, Redis, NETWAYS und Obmondo – für einen tiefen Einblick in moderne Open-Source-Storage-Lösungen. Hier geht es zur Anmeldung: https://hubs.ly/Q04prqFl0 Verwendet den Discount-Code: **LINBIT25**

This article describes how to present 512B sectors to iSCSI initiators when the underlying storage uses 4K native (4Kn) sectors. It covers manual targetcli and SCST examples, Pacemaker resource agent configuration, DRBD Reactor promoter plugin configuration, and LINSTOR Gateway examples. https://hubs.ly/Q04qPfpl0