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LINBIT/linstor-server
High Performance Software-Defined Block Storage for container, cloud and virtualisation. Fully integrated with Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, Proxmox etc.
LINSTOR is LINBIT's software-defined block storage system built on top of DRBD, split into a controller (cluster state, scheduling) and satellite (per-node storage ops) service that talk over their own TCP protocol. It's aimed at people who need replicated block storage under Kubernetes, Proxmox, OpenStack, or CloudStack and don't want to run Ceph.
The controller/satellite split is a real architectural choice, not just marketing copy — the control plane can be made HA independently of data availability, which matters when a node dies mid-write. Backend support is genuinely broad: LVM (thin and thick), ZFS, NVMe-oF, PMEM, LUKS, dm-cache/writecache as stackable layers, so you're not locked into one storage type per cluster. It's also not a toy — this is the same codebase backing LINBIT's commercial support, with a CSI driver and plugins for Proxmox/OpenStack/CloudStack/OpenNebula that are actually maintained, not bolted on.
You need DRBD 9 as a kernel module on every satellite node for the replication features that are the whole point of this project — that's an out-of-tree kernel dependency you have to track across distro kernel upgrades, which is exactly the kind of operational tax Ceph or a userspace-only solution avoids. Quorum requires a minimum of three nodes, so this isn't something you spin up for a two-box homelab without accepting degraded guarantees. The build isn't `git clone && build`: you need `--recursive` clone plus a `./gradlew getProtoc` step to fetch a matching protobuf compiler into `./tools` before `gradlew assemble` works. And the README itself is mostly badges and a feature list — actual architecture and setup detail lives in LINBIT's external user guide, not in this repo, so you can't fully evaluate the project from GitHub alone.