I used ReFS and Starwind for my lab environment and although I don't need rocket performance it's running great. Having said that I never did a perf benchmark with Starwind on ReFS and Starwind on NTFS so maybe I'm missing out on extra performance I could have had. Oh well, too much data to wipe and...

I would leave it. People will soon get used to the windows 8/2012 look and feel!

Anton, I do apologize. There was me looking for the back button in the pre 2012/windows 8 location (i.e. alongside the "next" button) where of course it is now in the top left hand corner.

Thanks for pointing that out!

Andy

I'd rather keep the cache drives as separate entities to limit the perf impact if any one failed. At least then you can lose a cache drive and only a subset of your volumes lose L2 cache functionality.

Admittedly I use Starwind for my home lab of 2 vSphere 5.5 hosts with ~25 VM's of mixed workloads (not very large by most standards) but I rarely see the CPU doing much (Core i7 930 2.8Ghz from about 2-3 years ago). I was tracking some large data copies, storage vMotions etc and the CPU wasn't taxed...

Just thinking about what would could be changed in this product to make it more flexible and the things I keep coming back to are the L1 & L2 cache sizes and configurations. How about one global L1 cache pool for all volumes so that resources can be expanded within a system without having to re-...

You can do that, I'm doing it with my lab build here. I have 2 x 128GB SSD's and operate them as independent L2 cache drives using one for one set of volumes and the other for a second set of volumes. You could RAID 0 them together if you want one big pool of cache space but then you increase the ch...

As the title suggest I'm getting quite a few of the following messages in the starwind server log. 12/2 17:47:35.590 c54 IMG: *** ImageFile_ScsiExec: WRITE_SAME (0x93) is not supported. I am using the latest v8 build on windows 2012 R2 standard with 16GB of RAM, 4 disk RAID-10 set (4 x 1TB) and 2 x ...

Just testing starwind 8 in my lab (4 core box 2012 R2 with a couple of 1gb nics, 16Gb of RAM and a 4disk RAID 10 set plus 2 x 128Gb SSD). I have carved out a single volume so far from my RAID 10 disk set to be used to hold virtual disks to be presented out to a couple of ESXi hosts. Before I format ...