End-of-Life Announcement for DRBD-based HA support in Chef Server

Today we are announcing the end-of-life date for support of the DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) High Availability feature of Chef Server to be March 31, 2019.

The DRBD HA topology has been deprecated for over two years, since the release of Chef HA (also known as Chef Backend) and Chef Server 12.9. DRBD HA was originally designed for a physical datacenter environment under the user’s control, and is not well-suited for modern virtualized environments with highly varying network conditions. It’s why we released Chef HA several years ago, which is more stable and suitable for both data center and virtual environments.

What does end-of-life mean?

As of today, new Chef Server releases will not be validated against DRBD-based installations.

On the end-of-life date, all DRBD-based installations of Chef Server will no longer be supported by Chef.

What are the replacement products? What should I do if I am still using these products?

Chef HA was announced over two years ago and is the recommended solution for all customers. It is a licensed product and available under the terms of a Chef Automate subscription.

For more information on migrating from DRBD HA to Chef HA, see this blog post and webinar: Best Practices for Migrating your Chef Server.  

Customers in cloud environments are also encouraged to look at AWS OpsWorks and the newly-announced Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure.

Who can I contact to discuss my upgrade and support options?

Please contact your Chef Customer Success Manager or Account Representative to review your options around this end-of-life announcement.

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Julian Dunn

Julian is a former Chef employee