Lightbits Brings NVMe over TCP Shared Storage to Proxmox VE, Supporting Open-Architecture VMware Alternatives

Lightbits Labs, inventor of the NVMe over TCP storage protocol and Inferra, intelligent KV cache orchestration engine, announced that it has been named a Solution Provider by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH and released a native storage plugin for Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE).The integration gives organizations evaluating alternatives to VMWare way to deploy shared, high-performance block storage using standard servers and existing Ethernet infrastructure.

As organizations reassess virtualization infrastructure and explore open-source alternatives, storage remains a critical consideration. Lightbits SDS disaggregated architecture enables independent scaling while delivering NVMe flash performance over standard Ethernet. It runs on commodity servers and replicates data across storage nodes to help maintain availability during drive and server failures. Multipath connectivity supports resilience vs. network-path failures. The result is shared block storage for performance-sensitive virtualized workloads that is easy to manage and configure through Proxmox VE and doesn’t require costly, complex networking. 

The Lightbits open-source plug-in connects Proxmox VE clusters to Lightbits software-defined storage over NVMe/TCP. Administrators can provision, resize, snapshot and roll back volumes through the Proxmox VE interface, CLI and API. Because every cluster node accesses the same shared storage, VMs can move between hosts through live migration, while HA configurations can support workloads through host failures.

“Proxmox VE supports a wide range of storage technologies, so organizations can build their infrastructure the way it best suits them,” said Tim Marx, COO, Proxmox. “This collaboration extends our service capabilities with a natively integrated option for performance-sensitive workloads, available to existing Lightbits SDS users and Proxmox VE users alike.”

“Our customers have been running Lightbits with Proxmox VE for a while, and the native plug-in makes that experience far simpler,” said Roiy Zysman, director, product management, Lightbits Labs. “Connecting, provisioning and operating Lightbits volumes now happens right where virtualization and storage teams already work, giving both a clear, easy way to manage their deployments. And this is only the start: more improvements are on the way.”

Key features and capabilities:

• Shared storage for clustered virtualization: Enable live migration and HA configurations with shared volumes accessible across cluster nodes
• Integrated storage management: Provision and manage volumes through the Proxmox VE web interface, CLI and API, including snapshots, rollback and online resizing
• Resilience: Replication across Lightbits storage nodes and multipath connectivity help maintain data availability during infrastructure failures
• Independent scaling: Scale compute and storage separately using standard servers, NVMe flash and Ethernet
• Open source: Apache 2.0-licensed plugin available on GitHub

The plug-in supports Proxmox VE 9.x and all supported and maintained Lightbits releases, including Short-Term Support (STS) and Long-Term Support (LTS) versions.