Cozystack 1.7 Alpha Overview: Blockstor Engine Deep Dive & VMware Forklift Migration

Cozystack community meeting 2026-03-09 In this episode of the Cozystack Bi-Weekly Community Meeting, Andrei Kvapil introduces the new Cozystack 1.7 Alpha release and its major features. The first half covers the new Compute Plane pattern designed for AI/LLM workloads, Backup API enhancements, and a live demo of the open-source Forklift engine migrating production virtual machines from VMware vSphere directly into Cozystack. The second half features a technical deep dive into Blockstor — a custom, stateless alternative to Java-based LINSTOR written completely in Go using the Kubernetes controller-runtime pattern. Andrei demonstrates the Blockstor CLI, volume provisioning, ReadWriteMany (RWX) NFS sharing, and outlines the platform's development roadmap until 2027. Subscribe to our community calendar and join the cloud-native infrastructure conversation! Chapters: 00:00:00 — Welcome screen and awaiting attendees 00:08:07 — Introduction & Subscribing to Cozystack Community Calendar 00:10:25 — Cozystack 1.7 Alpha Overview: Splitting Node Groups & Compute Plane 00:11:38 — AI Workloads Support & Cozy LLM External Apps Pattern 00:12:41 — New Backup API Enhancements & Unified TLS CA Trust Chain 00:14:48 — VMware to Cozystack Migration: Live Demo using Forklift Engine 00:18:42 — Q&A: Windows VM Drivers and EFI Firmware Translation 00:20:13 — Introducing Blockstor: A Stateless Go Alternative to Java Linstor 00:25:24 — Deep Dive into Blockstor CLI & Resource Group Definition 00:28:13 — CSI Plugin Reuse, Fault Tolerance & ReadWriteMany (RWX) NFS Setup 00:31:01 — RWX Volume Provisioning & Demo with Multiple Consuming Pods 00:34:56 — Performance: Block Volume ReadWriteMany for VM Live Migration 00:36:20 — Roadmap and Future Features: BYOK Encryption & QEMU Storage Daemon Backend 00:40:54 — Q&A: Blockstor Stateless Architecture & Kubernetes API Communication 00:44:03 — Scaling Blockstor Controller & Scaling via Leader Election 00:45:41 — Q&A: RWX Replication Architecture & NFS Server Fencing Between Nodes 00:50:04 — Cozystack Community Marketplace Design Proposal Preview 00:52:27 — Open Floor Discussion: Network Observability & Platform Roadmap until 2027 00:55:34 — Q&A: Service Mesh, Advanced Load Balancing, and Kilo ClusterMesh Operator Cozystack: Free Cloud Platform based on Kubernetes | CNCF Sandbox Project Minutes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y... Agenda and notes: Cozystack 1.7 alpha https://github.com/cozystack/cozystac... Forklift. What is it? Not a warehouse truck. Blockstor (alt to to LINSTOR) updates Migration tool: https://github.com/cozystack/blocksto... docs: https://github.com/cozystack/website/... Marketplace What’s new? Open Floor: Project updates, community feedback and topics for future meetings Review of cozystack/community#65 Other design proposals review: open proposals on GitHub https://github.com/cozystack/communit... Share your enhancement and architecture proposals by opening a PR at https://github.com/cozystack/communit... Join the community: Telegram group t.me/cozystack Slack group https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives... (Get invite at https://slack.kubernetes.io) Cozystack resources: https://cozystack.io https://cozystack.io/docs/get-started https://cozystack.io/blog https://github.com/cozystack/cozystack 📅 Subscribe to our community meetings calendar: https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfounda... 🗓️ Add meetings to your calendar: https://webcal.prod.itx.linuxfoundati... #Cozystack #CloudNativeStorage #VMwareMigration #DevOps #Kubernetes #LINSTOR #GoLang #SRE #OpenSource #KubeVirt