LINBIT Deployment Tool 1.0 release

Release Announcements
1

Greetings all,

Last Thursday we released the LINBIT Deployment Tool. It does require you sign up for an eval so you can install our official packages, but it’s free and we won’t harass you - we just need known good packages :slight_smile:

If you’ve ever set up a LINSTOR cluster by hand — repo setup, DRBD module builds, satellite/controller install, storage pools, DRBD Reactor, HA gateways — you know there are a lot of moving parts and plenty of places to get an ordering or dependency detail wrong. The LINBIT Deployment Tool is a desktop app (Electron + React) that wraps LINBIT’s official Ansible collections in a guided wizard so you can stand up a production-ready HA cluster without hand-writing inventories or playbooks.

What it does for you:

  • Wizard-driven, not magic. It generates standard Ansible inventories and runs the upstream linbit.* collections via ansible-playbook.
    No forked roles, no hidden hacks — what it deploys is exactly what LINBIT ships and supports.
  • Correct ordering, every time. Repo setup → DRBD install → cluster init → storage pools → HA database → DRBD Reactor → HA gateway →GUI, with all the dependency resolution handled for you.
  • HA gateways built in. Create iSCSI, NFS, and NVMe-oF targets directly through DRBD Reactor promoters — pick your protocol, volume size, and gateway nodes in the UI.
  • Per-node control. Mixed diskful/diskless topologies, per-node device selection, and arbiter setups are all first-class.
  • Clean rollback & reset. Every deploy action has matching cleanup. If a deploy fails partway, you can reset the affected nodes and re-deploy — no manual residue-hunting through systemd units, LVM VGs, and iptables rules.
  • Cross-distro. Tested across AlmaLinux/EL, Ubuntu, and Debian, including stripped EL10 cloud images and the DKMS/kernel-header edge cases that usually bite you.
  • Bundled, current Ansible. Ships its own Python/ansible-core runtime, so you’re not fighting an old system Ansible or polluting your workstation environment.

It runs on your workstation and deploys to remote targets over SSH — your machine never becomes part of the cluster. Let me know if you have any questions.