Name: Longhorn Block Storage
Rating: 10 (2 reviews)
Author: SUSE

Help Desk

Web and Video Conferencing

Customer Support

Business Intelligence (BI)

Collaboration

Data Discovery and Visualization

Document Management

Enhanced 911 (E911)

File Sharing

Risk Management

Statistical Analysis

Enterprise

Accounting

Invoicing

Subscription Management

Finance and Accounting

Applicant Tracking

Corporate Learning Management

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

HR Management

Payroll

Recruitment Agency

Recruitment Automation

Talent Intelligence

Talent Management

Workforce Analytics

Workforce Management

Human Resources

Cloud Storage

Data Lakehouse

Data Mapping

Firewall Security Management

Fraud Detection

IP Address Management (IPAM)

In-Memory Databases

Incident Response

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

Log Management

Managed IT Service

Network Performance Monitoring

Password Management System

Release Management

SOA Application Gateways

Web Portal

WiFi Hotspot

Information Technology

A/B Testing

Ad Serving & Retargeting

All-in-One Marketing

Appointment Scheduling

Audio Editing

Content Management

Customer Reference Management

Email Marketing

Email Testing

Marketing Automation

Product Sampling

Retail Media Advertising

Social Media Management

Social Media Marketing

Survey & Forms Building

Web Analytics

Marketing

Field Service Management

Project Management

Professional Services

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Lead Generation Services

Lead-to-Account Matching and Routing

Multichannel Retail

Sales Coaching

Sales Gamification

Social Commerce

Sales

Architecture

InsurTech

Laboratory Information Management

Legal Billing

OSS/BSS (Operations Support/Business Support)

Oil and Gas

Real Estate

Vertical-Specific

Find top rated software and services based on in-depth reviews from verified users. 400+ software categories including PaaS, NoSQL, BI, HR, and more.

IBM Storage Ceph

Red Hat Gluster Storage

Red Hat

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon AWS

StarWind SAN & NAS

StarWind

Pure Storage FlashArray

Pure Storage

OVHcloud Public Cloud

OVHcloud

StarWind Virtual SAN

Google Cloud Persistent Disk

Google

Akamai Cloud Computing

Akamai

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

Nutanix

### Kubernetes Integration
Users generally appreciate Rancher's ability to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters efficiently and easily. When it comes to Longhorn Block Storage's kubernetes integration, reviewers have expressed mixed opinions. Some users find the kubernetes integration capabilities of Longhorn Block Storage to be robust and reliable, enhancing their container orchestration systems. However, there are also users who feel that Longhorn Block Storage's kubernetes integration could be further improved to meet their specific needs and preferences. The sentiment regarding Longhorn Block Storage's kubernetes integration appears to vary among users, with some finding it beneficial while others see room for enhancement.

### Deployment and Management
Users generally praise Longhorn Block Storage for its deployment and management capabilities across multiple clusters and environments. They appreciate the ease of deploying Kubernetes clusters with Rancher, highlighting that even junior staff can effectively manage the platform. The tool's comprehensive management capabilities, ease of deployment, and quick value realization are frequently mentioned as key strengths. Users also value the platform's openness across various platforms and the support provided by the Rancher team. Additionally, the ability to manage large-scale clusters between private, public cloud, and bare metal environments is seen as a significant advantage. Despite some minor drawbacks such as limited SSO options and occasional webpage update issues, Longhorn Block Storage's deployment and management features are generally well-received by users.

### Multi-Cluster Management
Users generally appreciate Longhorn Block Storage's efficient multi-cluster management capabilities. The tool enables users to easily deploy services, scale, and monitor services across multiple production clusters of Kubernetes orchestration. With the ability to create and manage multiple clusters within a short timeframe, Longhorn Block Storage simplifies the process of adding multiple nodes to a single Kubernetes cluster. Additionally, users find it beneficial that junior tech staff can effectively monitor and escalate issues, allowing for quick identification and adjustment of cluster issues with just a click of a button. The native Kubernetes management provided by Longhorn Block Storage eliminates the need for complex kubectl commands, further enhancing the user experience in managing multiple clusters across various environments.

### Cloud and Infrastructure
Users consistently highlight Rancher's ability to simplify the management of multiple Kubernetes clusters, emphasizing its near upstream Kubernetes architecture and support for various public cloud and on-premises infrastructures. While some users have noted past issues with stability in earlier versions, the platform's continuous improvements have addressed these concerns. Additionally, Rancher's cross-cloud compatibility and multi-host docker-compose support are commended for enhancing flexibility and ease of use in diverse cloud and infrastructure environments.

### Security and Access Control
Users consistently praise Longhorn Block Storage for its robust security and access management features. The feedback highlights the ease of managing user access, role-based access control (RBAC), and integration with various authentication providers like LDAP. Longhorn's security measures have been commended for providing a secure environment for containers, ensuring data protection and access control across different projects and clusters. The platform's intuitive interface and simplified access management tools contribute to a positive user experience, enabling efficient monitoring and control over security settings.

### Performance and Scalability
Reviewers have varying opinions on Rancher's performance and scalability features. Some users appreciate the ease of troubleshooting and manual scaling capabilities offered by Rancher, allowing for efficient management of multiple production clusters. However, concerns have been raised about the high overhead on nodes in a high availability setup, particularly with the use of RKE and etcd. Additionally, there are mentions of limitations in single sign-on options and occasional staleness in webpage updates. Despite these drawbacks, Rancher remains a popular choice for managing Kubernetes workloads and clusters across different environments.

### User Interface and Usability
Users also appreciate Rancher's interactive GUI for automatic scaling and its ability to facilitate the setup of Kubernetes clusters, especially for those with limited IT resources. The platform's visually appealing design and intuitive features make it a popular choice for managing complex Kubernetes environments. However, some users have raised concerns about the pricing of support services and the lack of visibility and control over Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) directly from the GUI. Despite these drawbacks, Rancher remains a favored option for many users due to its user-centric approach and the support provided by the knowledgeable SUSE Rancher team.

Longhorn is cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes, supported by Rancher Labs headquartered in Cupertino.

UpCloud is a global cloud hosting company offering cloud servers on an hourly billed infrastructure-as-a-service. Their IaaS services include MaxIOPS block storage, their Simple backup service, SDN services, and resource isolation.

Private Cloud Storage

Private Cloud Hosts -Standard Nodes

Cloud Servers - General Purpose

GPU Servers

Cloud Servers - High CPU

Cloud Servers - Developer

Cloud Servers - High Memory

Cloud Servers - Cloud Native

Relational Databases - 1 Node

Block Storage - MaxIOPS

Block Storage - Standard

Managed Object Storage

SDN Private Networks - Floating IP address

UpCloud

Longhorn Block Storage

Block storage is data stored in volumes acting as individual drives which can be configured and moved around a storage area network (SAN). It is the most common type of storage used for applications, RAID arrays, and virtual machines. Block storage systems lack metadata but are familiar and easy to work with, performant, and can be used across distributed systems at relatively low loss to efficiency.

Block Storage

Likelihood to Recommend

Usability

SUSE

VMware ESXi

VMware vCenter

Dell PowerScale

SUSE Rancher

SUSE NeuVector

OpenSearch

DevOps Architect for Containerization Platforms and Microservices

Longhorn Block Storage 2024-06-21 16:30:47

Drupal

Splunk Enterprise

Zabbix

HAProxy Community Edition

openSUSE Tumbleweed

AlmaLinux OS

Longhorn Block Storage 2022-09-11 08:09:11

TrustRadius is a technology and business research firm based in Austin, Texas. The company is known as a review platform for verified B2B technology and software reviews through a proprietary algorithm and human verification.

TrustRadius

Little hard

Free storage

Easy to install

Storage solution

Nice ui

Good overview

Home

We use Longhorn Block Storage as primary Persistent Storage in our Kubernetes platform based on Rancher. Before changing to Longhorn we used file-based solutions NFS and GlusterFS, which were incapable of hosting databases especially NoSQL blob storage used in ElasticSearch, Redis, ETCD, RabbitMQ and similar products, what resulted in common data corruption issues. Longhorn Block Storage gave us what we needed: secure, replicated and reasonably fast persistent storage.

Leverages industry standard protocol (iSCSI)
Is block-based storage instead of file-based
Is truly software defined storage (SDS)
Can use commodity hardware to build redundant SDS
Is open-source software
Is one of the CNCF projects
Provides enterprise functionalities like snapshots or backups

ReadWriteMany Longhorn volumes are still using NFS (file-based) protocol in the core.
Using iSCSI as main protocol instead of FC ties Longhorn to Ethernet-based LAN which is in most architectures much slower that FC-based SAN.
Longhorn could implement S3 as alternative access protocol to its volumes.
Backups, and snapshots configuration could be configured at each volume-level by administrators (maybe from additional CRD object?), because currently is configured at storage-class level which is not granular enough.

Longhorn is fully open source. One can try and/or use Longhorn for free even in enterprise and buy subscriptions only for environments that must be fully supported. We started with Longhorn in our lab environment and followed on through reference platform to non-production and production environments.
Longhorn subscriptions are not cheap, but its biggest advantage is that price-to-functionality ratio is very reasonable.
We have volumes with hundreds of gigabytes of data and these on Longhorn perform well in solutions where file-based GlusterFS volumes were corrupting data.

Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerScale

SUSE Rancher, VMware vCenter, VMware ESXi, SUSE NeuVector, OpenSearch

We use Longhorn Block Storage for Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster storage requirements. It is easily installed from Rancher web GUI with a few mouse clicks. Longhorn Block Storage solves our problem with read-write many (RWX) volumes. Many solutions provide only read-write once (RWO). Longhorn Block Storage, in the beginning, also did not support RWX, but the support was added in v1.1.0. Also, it's easy to make scheduled or on-demand volume snapshots using Longhorn web GUI. We use it to schedule regular volume snapshots and, in case of data corruption or other disasters, restore data back to volumes. Snapshots are lightning fast because Longhorn Block Storage is built on block storage.

Creates read-write many (RWX) volumes
Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
Scheduled and on-demand volume snapshots can be created using web GUI
Volume backups can be stored offsite on any S3 compatible storage solution
Backups and snapshots can be restored using web GUI

Version to version upgrades takes more expertise to do than initial deployment
If something goes wrong, you will need a help from support
Longhorn Block Storage speed is slightly slower than local disk storage speed

Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
Easy to create/restore volume snapshots
Supports read-write many volume type

It has provided a highly available storage solution for almost all our Kubernetes deployments
We can deploy new app versions with peace in mind because we have working data backups
Application development is faster because devs can play with data and easily restore it when needed

AlmaLinux OS, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Drupal, Zabbix, Splunk Enterprise, HAProxy

Longhorn Block Storage

Overview

What is Longhorn Block Storage?