Volumes formatting for best perfomance

Sergey Pugachov · Sat Sep 16, 2017 1:58 pm

Hello.

I am planning to run two-node hyper-converged cluster, Hyper-V + Starwind VSAN. I assume, there will be two RAID10 4x4TB HDD on each server for storing HA-device files. Sync lync supposed will be 10GBASE-T Ethernet crossover (w/0 switch).

I'm not clear in this points:
1) I will format RAID10 luns in GPT + NTFS for storing thick-provisioned devices.

Which cluster size should i use for NTFS volume?
Which cluster size should i select for HA device?
What is NTFS ACL best practice considerations in this case (no other files on volume, only HA-device images)?

2) Now, I mount ha-devices as iSCSI targets inside Hyper-V hosts (for cluser shared volumes) and i should format it. I planning that there will be only vhdx files on it. ReFS is good option? Which cluster size i should select during formatting?
3) And now i will create a vhdx file, mount it into VM, formatting it in NTFS. Which cluster size should i use?

And one more question. One of vhdx will be large storage for file server (4TB, CAD files, documents). Is it good practice to have file-server storage on virtual disk? Before that I always used local storage or iSCSI LUN for such tasks...

Sergey Pugachov · Sat Sep 16, 2017 3:28 pm

I think it should be something like that:
1) RAID10 LUN - NTFS formatted with 64K. 4K seleted for HA-device cluster
2) Cluster Shared Volumes ReFS formatted with 64k
3) Guest VHDX - NTFS formatted default (4KB)

Mon Sep 18, 2017 9:24 am

Hello Sergey Pugachov and thank you for your question!
1) StarWind supports underlying storage with both 512B and 4KB physical sector size. We recommend using 4K in Hyper-V environment and 512B in ESXi. RAID10 is recommended for HDD drives. It is a good practice to keep about 100GB free on the volume where StarWind image file is located.
2) Feel free to use NTFS. We have compared 2 file systems and NTFS is a bit faster than ReFS and still reliable https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/refs-performance
3) NTFS for .vhdx file. And regarding your concerns to have file-server storage on virtual disk: it is a stable reliable solution. That's why we offer trial licenses (together with free without GUI), so you could evaluate the product and decide for yourself.

P.S. I hope this will be interesting for you as well:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/techni ... ctices.pdf