LINSTOR Ansible Playbook

Build a LINSTOR® cluster using Ansible. If you're unfamiliar with LINSTOR, please refer to the Introduction to LINSTOR section of the LINSTOR user's guide on https://linbit.com to learn more.

System requirements:

• An account at https://my.linbit.com (contact sales@linbit.com).
• Deployment environment must have Ansible 2.7.0+ and python-netaddr.
• All target systems must have passwordless SSH access.
• All hostnames used in the inventory file are resolvable (or use IP addresses).
• Target systems are RHEL 7/8/9 or Ubuntu 22.04 (or compatible variants).

Usage

Add the target system information into the inventory file named hosts.ini. For example:

[controller]
192.168.35.12

[satellite]
192.168.35.[10:11]

[linstor_cluster:children]
controller
satellite

[linstor_storage_pool]
192.168.35.[10:11]

You can add a controller node to the satellite node group which will result in the node becoming a Combined node in the LINSTOR cluster. A Combined node will function both as a controller and as a satellite node. Add nodes to the linstor_storage_pool node group to contribute block storage to the LINSTOR storage pool created by the playbook.

Also, before continuing, edit group_vars/all.yaml to configure the necessary variables for the playbook. For example:

---
# Ansible variables
ansible_user: vagrant
ansible_ssh_private_key_file: ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key
become: yes

# LINSTOR variables
drbd_backing_disk: /dev/sdb
drbd_replication_network: 192.168.222.0/24

# LINBIT portal variables
lb_user: "lbportaluser"
lb_pass: "lbportalpass"
lb_con_id: "1234"
lb_clu_id: "4321"

The drbd_backing_disk variable should be set to an unused block device that the LINSTOR satellite nodes will use if the nodes are also a part of the storage-pool node group. If you do not have an unused block device, do not add the node to the linstor_storage_pool node group, and only a file-thin storage-pool will be configured instead. The drbd_replication_network is the network, in CIDR notation, that will be used by LINSTOR and DRBD. It is strongly recommended that the drbd_replication_network be separate from the management network in production systems to limit network traffic congestion, but it's not a hard requirement.

When ready, run the site.yaml playbook:

ansible-playbook site.yaml

If you don't want to put your LINBIT credentials into the group_vars/all.yaml, you can run the playbook like this instead:

ansible-playbook -e lb_user="username" -e lb_pass="password" -e lb_con_id="1234" -e lb_clu_id="1234" site.yaml

Congratulations! You should now have successfully created a LINSTOR cluster using Ansible.

Testing Installation

Shell into the controller node, and check that everything is setup:

linstor node list; linstor storage-pool list

Create and deploy a resource:

linstor resource-definition create test-res-0
linstor volume-definition create test-res-0 100MiB
linstor resource create \
  $(linstor sp list | head -n4 | tail -n1 | cut -d"|" -f3 | sed 's/ //g') \
  test-res-0 --storage-pool lvm-thin
linstor resource list

You should now have a DRBD device provisioned on a node in your cluster that you can use as you would any other block device.

Reference

For more information on LINSTOR - such as instructions for Kubernetes, OpenStack, Docker, or other integration - refer to LINBIT's LINSTOR documentation.