Thanks for the thorough explanation. I ordered a 128GB M2 PCI-E drive to start. I will use that for the L2 cache to start with. Would this be the best article to follow:

https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... dance/661/

Thank you for the insight. I guess I was thinking, if it were anything like L2ARC cache in FreeNAS, even a slow SSD and a dedicated (optimized) cache would work wonders. I was simply astonished what L2ARC did for ZFS. I was not as impressed with the ZIL cache. I know a ton about how those two work, ...

Hello all. I'm currently running (and have been very pleased with) StarWind vSAN Free for my home lab SAN. I have two targets... both with a group of three 2GB 5400rpm drives in RAID5. My XenServer hosts are connected to flat SRs on each via a 10gbe iSCSI connection. The hardware is a Dell R710 with...

No one?

I have what I hope is a simple question. In my home lab, I originally had five network interfaces in the free version of Virtual SAN. I noticed that there was iSCSI traffic on my XenServers in what I considered the management network. To make it easier to visualize, for each host, I had: 192.168.1.x...

No problem. Could it also be that the traffic is coming from a FreeNAS machine? Basically, I am using XenCenter to move machine storage from the old storage on the FreeNAS server to the new storage on the SW server. If there is an issue with multipathing on the FreeNAS machine, that would limit how ...

Sorry for the lack of updates... I'm actually on work travel right now. Right before I left, I was able to actually connect XenServer to the iSCSI target on the SW server and began to transfer files. Unfortunately, even with the multipath.conf file configured exactly the way your instructions indica...

I believe I may be having some odd issues with one of more of my Xen hosts. I am working on that now and hope to try and reconnect the SW SAN when I'm done (hopefully tonight).

Thanks for testing it. At least I know I did everything correctly. XenServer can be finicky...

Well, I'm home... and I just double-checked my license. I most definitely have the VSAN Free license applied, and I have already been able to make multiple iSCSI connections... just without MPIO working very well. Since making the multipath.conf changes in the referenced PDF, I haven't been able to ...

Cabuzzi free version gives you iscsi only on loopback (eg: local connection inside the starwind hosts). This is useful if you plan to implement an nfs cluster running on top of microsoft failover cluster (just present the starwind lun as shared csv volume on the microsoft cluster and run an nfs sha...

I must've misinterpreted what was available in the free version. I was under the impression iSCSI was allowed under the free version, but HA iSCSI was not. By HA iSCSI, I was considering HA to mean a "cluster" or failover mode between two actual nodes (ie: two Starwind servers) and not HA ...

Well, so far... things aren't going well. I completely blew away my configuration on the SW server and followed the guide as closely as I could. As I mentioned in previous posts, I could connect with my last setup just fine (using what I knew of Xen and iSCSI, and applying it to SW), but did not hav...

Awesome. Looking forward to testing it over the weekend!


Chris

Hi Cabuzzi! Ouch! It looks like I have provided a really old guidance for you and I am really sorry for that :( We actually have a new one available here: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/technical_papers/StarWind-Virtual-SAN-Providing-HA-storage-repositories-for-XenServer-Pool.pdf Please refer to ...

I'll go ahead and reply again, even though I get the feeling you guys are ignoring me because you think I'm not looking up documentation. If that is the case, there are two problems with that: 1) Your Xen documentation is old. If you want to say you support it, then it really needs to be updated. 2)...