drbd-utils | DRBD userspace utilities

LINSTOR manages storage in a cluster of nodes replicating disk space inside a LVM or ZFS volume (or bare partition I'd say) by using DRDB (Distributed Replicated Block Device) to replicate data across the nodes, as per the official docs:

"LINSTOR is a configuration management system for storage on Linux systems. It manages LVM logical volumes and/or ZFS ZVOLs on a cluster of nodes. It leverages DRBD for replication between different nodes and to provide block storage devices to users and applications. It manages snapshots, encryption and caching of HDD backed data in SSDs via bcache."

So I'd say yes, you really need to have the driver on every node on which you want to use the driver (I did see Docker's storage plugin try to mount the DRBD volume locally)

However, you do not necessarily need to have the storage space itself on the compute node, since you can mount a diskless DRBD resource from volumes that are replicated on separate nodes so I'd say your idea should work, unless there is some bug in the driver itself I didn't discover yet: your compute node(s) needs to be registered as being a diskless node for all the required pools (I didn't try this but remember reading it's not only possible but recommended for some types of data migrations).

Of course if you don't have more than 1 storage nodes you don't gain much from using LINSTOR/drbd (node or disk failure will leave you diskless). My use case for it was to have replicated storage across different servers in different datacenters, so that the next time one burns to a crisp 😅 I can have my data and containers running after minutes instead of several days...