Block Storage
With support for all major KVM-based systems and containers: OpenNebula, OpenStack, Proxmox VE, Kubernetes
Fast and simple distributed
software-defined storage
Vitastor
- Distributed SDS
- ...but Fast 🚀 — latency 0.1 ms
- ...and Simple ✌️ — 60k lines of code, not 1 mln
- From Russia with love 🙂
Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
Software that assembles usual servers with usual drives into a single scalable fault-tolerant storage cluster with extended features
Why do IaaS/PaaS providers use SDS?
- Scalability
- Client data preservation
- Reduced costs due to hyperconvergence
- No need for server "micromanagement"
- Different storage classes (SSD, HDD)
But most SDS are an overhead
Overhead
- Q=1 — best possible latency
- 4 kb write to SSD — 0.04 ms
- 4 kb write to Ceph — from ~ 1 ms
- Internal cloud SDS's – ± the same
- 2400 % overhead !
Vitastor
- ~ 0.1 ms replicated latency
- ~ 0.2 ms erasure-coded latency
- 3-8 GByte/s per client (VM)
- ~ 400000 iops per client
- Just ~1 CPU core per NVMe disk
- Low (50%) rebalance impact
Vitastor — protocols
- Block access (VM disks, containers):
Kubernetes, Proxmox, OpenNebula, OpenStack and others - VitastorFS (NFS) — clustered POSIX FS
- Object storage (S3) — based on Zenko CloudServer
Features
- Replication, erasure codes (N+K)
- All disk support: SSD/NVMe, HDD, SSD+HDD
- Flexible data placement
- RDMA / RoCEv2 support
- Fast snapshots and clones
- Fast checksums, data scrubbing
- Monitoring
- Kubernetes operator
- And more...
Architecture
- Symmetric distributed, Ø SPOF
- Block base layer
- Uniform load balancing
- Transactional writes → data loss protection
- Optimised for modern SSD/HDD
Ease of support
- Low number of components
- Human-readable metadata in etcd
- Minimal external dependencies
- Compact implementation:
~60k lines of code (Ceph ~1M) - Non-standard architecture support (E2K)
Licensing
- Own Copyleft license: VNPL
- Free use in OpenSource environment
- Closed-source services require commercial support
- Technical and architectural support from author
Contacts
- Vitaliy Filippov
- vitastor.io
t.me/vitastor- t.me/vitalif
- vitalif@mail.ru
- +7 (926) 589-84-07
Clustered File System
Ground-up implementation of a scalable POSIX
Read-Write-Many file system,
mountable over NFS 3.0
Latest Posts
Vitastor 3.2.0 released
This is a bugfix release, and most of the fixes came from a new approach to testing: a chaos test for the block store, which now runs in CI on every change.
Also thanks to Yury Luneff from MIND Software for another part of the fixes.
2026-08-31 Continue reading →
Vitastor 3.1.0 released
Finally, the security release!
New features:
- Fully secure cluster setup support:
- etcd transport encryption (TLS/mTLS)
- OSD transport encryption (AES-GCM), header-only by default, thus very fast
- End-to-end image data encryption (AES-XTS)
- Optional external Vault AES-XTS key storage
- Certificate-based authentication
- Optional user privilege support with etcd- and OSD-based access control
- xxhash3 transport checksums (data-only by default)
- New on-disk checksum algorithm option: xxh3_32 - xxhash3 truncated to 32 bits
- DNS name support for etcd and Vault URLs
- HTTP API server mode: vitastor-cli serve
- Mixing CAS and non-CAS writes within a single client instance is now allowed and works correctly
- make-etcd can now initialize the whole cluster by copying configs and starting other nodes through ssh
- Debian 10 (Buster) and CentOS 7 support is completed, packages won’t be updated anymore
Read detailed security feature documentation here: https://vitastor.io/docs/usage/security.html
2026-07-24 Continue reading →
Vitastor 3.0.16 released
Quite a bit of fixes, but mostly small. :-)
Most interesting fix affect pools without immediate_commit (for desktop SSDs): fixed corner cases in the commit (sync) operation and CAS write operation (used, for example, in VitastorFS).
Other notable changes: “double-claim” bug is fixed in the new store, and changes are made to reduce etcd load during active PG state switching.
You can read the details below.
2026-07-19 Continue reading →
Vitastor 3.0.15 released
Minor fixes this time:
- A correct fix for QEMU virtual disk migration when iothread is enabled is finally found and released. Verified — migration now works. For now, QEMU packages are updated only for Proxmox 9, others will be updated shortly.
- Fixed operations of Proxmox VMs with swTPM (for example, Windows VMs) without enabling NBD-based mounting of all disks (thanks to users from the chat).
- It turned out that in recent releases, a version of Antietcd with broken cluster mode slipped into all Debian packages (but not RPMs) — this happened because the build used Antietcd from master rather than from a stable tag. This is now fixed - Debian packages are now built with stable Antietcd again, and the clustering issue is fixed in Antietcd itself. The issue was leading to failed leader election in a Antietcd cluster.
- Fixed monitor startup with embedded Antietcd when using IPv6.
- Fixed space statistics calculation for FS and S3 pools in the new storage (PR #127).
2026-06-28 Continue reading →
Vitastor 3.0.14 released
How many (bugs!) I’ve knifed, how many I’ve slit! (more than 50)
General note: most bug fixes now include regression tests to verify that they don’t repeat in the future. Most bugs fixed in this release were detected by using LLM analysis (Claude Opus/Fable, GPT 5.5).
2026-06-21 Continue reading →