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LINBIT / windrbd

DRBD driver for windows
GNU General Public License v2.0
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drbd windows

readme

First things first

Clone this repository with 

git clone --recursive <url>

else you get an incomplete checkout.

If you need installable binaries (self-signed) please go to

https://linbit.com/linbit-software-download-page-for-linstor-and-drbd-linux-driver/#drbd-windows

You will have to put your Windows machine into test mode for the driver to load. To do so run

bcdedit /set TESTSIGNING ON

as Administrator and reboot the machine.

If you need support or if you need officially signed binaries (no need for testmode), please contact Linbit (www.linbit.com) at sales@linbit.com

What is WinDRBD?

WinDRBD is a port of Linbit's Distributed Replicated Block Device Linux driver to Microsoft Windows. Technically it is a thin compatibility layer that maps Linux specific kernel API calls to the Microsoft Windows NT Kernel API.

DRBD itself is used to build High Availability clusters by replicating contents of block devices over a network to (up to 31) other nodes.

WinDRBD is based on DRBD 9. It was originally started by Korean company Mantech and was later rewritten by Johannes Thoma for Linbit.

DRBD devices are exported as SCSI disks as soon as the resource becomes primary and can be partitioned and formatted with the standard Windows tools (diskpart, partition editor in control panel, powershell).

What else is needed?

If you have a binary package, you don't need to install CygWin since the Cygwin DLL comes with the binary package. Commands like drbdadm and windrbd should work out-of-the-box with the Windows cmd shell.

We strongly recommend to use the binary packages provided by Linbit since they are signed with a Microsoft key and therefore should load without putting Windows into test mode.

For detailed build instructions, please see the file INSTALL. Having said that you need a Windows box with CygWin installed and a Linux box to build WinDRBD from source.

For building you need Ewdk from Microsoft and a separate Linux Box with spatch (concinelle) installed.

You need a recent version of drbd-utils. To obtain it, do a:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/LINBIT/drbd-utils.git

and follow the build instruction in README-windrbd.md file of the repo.

Configuring DRBD

The DRBD config files can be found in following folder:

C:\windrbd\etc\drbd.d

The C:\windrbd folder can be configured at installation time (use this for example if your C: drive is read only).

Put your resources (extension .res) into the C:\windrbd\etc\drbd.d folder (from within a CygWin shell you can access this via

/cygdrive/c/windrbd/etc/drbd.d/<name>.res

Then with

drbdadm up <name>

you can bring your DRBD resource up. Please refer to the DRBD Users guide (be sure to pick the 9.0 version) for more information of how to configure and administrate DRBD. Most drbdadm commands should work exactly like with the Linux version of DRBD.

Note that since WinDRBD and DRBD are very similar many procedures from the DRBD user's guide should also work with WinDRBD. Currently there is no separate WinDRBD user's guide.

There is also a WinDRBD specific tech guide which explains how to prepare two Windows Server 2016 nodes for use with WinDRBD. Please see the Linbit website for that guide.

Also there are some newer (beginning 2023) articles on https://kb.linbit.com

Differences to Linux DRBD

Note that there is a more detailed documentation of the differences on http://kb.linbit.com

In the configuration the only difference to Linux DRBD is that block devices are specified as you would expect it under Microsoft Windows, that is drive letters or GUID's are used. Examples:

disk "F:";
# or:
disk "0b098289-8295-11e7-bddb-0800274272c4";

We recommend not to assign drive letters to backing devices, since that easily may confuse the user. You can use the mountvol utility to find the GUID of a device.

Disk devices present themselves as a regular SCSI disk (like a physical hard disk) and appear as disk in the Windows partition manager (and also in device manager). With partition manager a partition table can be created and then partitions (with assigned drive letters) can be created on the disk. The partitions can be formatted with all supported file systems. This means that that normally there is be a partition table on the disk (under Linux, kpartx can be used to create device nodes for each partition).

Example for a disk device would be:

device minor 42;

(with no mount point). Mount points can be assigned with partition manager.

A special case of the disk device is the boot device. Booting from a remote (Linux) server is possible now (however without local backing storage and installation is quite difficult now). There is a document on 

https://downloads.linbit.com/

("Setting up WinDRBD diskless boot") that describes the process (which is subject to change).

Current limitations

The current 1.1 branch has following restrictions:

Logging

To view the log file go to

C:\windrbd\windrbd-kernel.log

If you need remote logging, please read on.

We use syslog UDP packets and a Linux host to debug WinDRBD.

To configure the log host set a Registry key (string value):

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\drbd\syslog_ip

and assign it the IP address.

You can use 

windrbd set-syslog-ip ipv4-address

to change the syslog IP for this session (the registry key is only evaluated at server start).

If you are logging to the local Windows machine, use 127.0.0.1 as IP address (this is the default).

There is also a logfile written by the installer located in the %TEMP% directory. It should be consulted when something with the installation goes wrong.

Version history