Hey Yaroslav, I submitted a support request (406394) last Thursday, but have as yet heard nothing at all from StarWind support. Perhaps you could tell me, is that normal? Am I likely to wait a lot longer? If it's likely to be another week or more, I'm starting to think that I should fire up V2V, con...

Thank you very much, Yaroslav. To clarify, I do NOT believe my original license was a "TRIAL". It is not labelled as such internally, and was not downloaded as such. I believe it was called an Evaluation license. The problem appears to be that, somewhere along the way, a "Trial" ...

Thank you very much, Yaroslav. I really appreciate your help, especially when you are so busy. Re: Witness and Cluster Validation The Witness drive on one host was online in disk management, and the other offline, exactly as normal, when the Cluster Validation checks were run. It also shows as onlin...

Unfortunately, the StarWind VSAN dropped all connections again. Based on what I'm seeing, it won't stay up more than 24 hours, and the symptoms are looking pretty consistent. I'm becoming convinced this is NOT an network issue, at least not at the Ethernet level. It's an ISCSI authentication issue ....

Just for info, I ran continuing pings for all 5 Ethernet ports for about a day. The results were about 400,000 total pings with 0 drops, average round trip time 0 ms on all ports, max round trip time ranged from 4 ms to 9 ms. NetworkCountersWatch shows one input error on one port on one host (HV4). ...

I've double-checked the NICs, they look rock-solid. Continuous pings on all ports run under 1 ms, zero timeouts. All diagnostics including both StarWInd and MS Cluster say the networks are good, zero complaints. The MS Cluster Validation Report says the same on both hosts: the Validate Disk Failover...

Oops, too late. It crashed again yesterday afternoon for no reason, starting with event log entries about iSCSI logon failures (error 10) as has happened a number of times lately, I cannot figure out why. Anyway, I shut both notes down and re-cabled everything. Which was probably just as well, becau...

OK, thanks! Sync is now healthy, I'm not going to touch a thing for a few days at least, then will switch to direct links. One cable at a time, watching to ensure health before doing the next. Would you recommend stopping VSAN services while I do this? Oh, by the way, I found a great little free too...

Thank you Yaroslav, that's helpful!

The logs are there, have PMed you.

--- kenw

Thank you very much for that very helpful response, Anton. That does, I think, sort of confirm my impression that iSCSI connects to storage at a level close to hardware. It would be interesting to see how SMB/CIFS and nfs compare. The problem for many people, I think, is that descriptions of the var...

As I mentioned in the other thread on caching, things did not go well here, but it's not clear why. I thought things were looking stable, and was mucking around trying to do updates on a non-clustered secondary DC VM which is not on the StarWind VSAN either, so it shouldn't have been a problem. But ...

When you say "IMHO iSCSI, like any transport protocol, belongs to level 4", are you referring to IP ISO layer? What you say is quite true in that network sense, but just to be clear, I wasn't referring to networking, I was talking about filesystem layer-like behaviour. A totally non-standa...

Thanks, Yaroslav. I was kind of hoping for a better idea what "some time" is, in the "no i/o to the device for some time". I mean, are we talking one second, one minute...? I though it was running well, so I enabled Windows Backup in Task Scheduled on one host. Things did not go ...

Here's a thought. Sometimes I think there should be layers for hardware storage definitions like there are for networks. E.g., layer 1 is hardware, layer 2 is hardware interface, layer 3 is storage structure (files, directories etc.), layer 4 is security and locking, sharing, and so on. I'm not tota...

A related question on this topic: What the dirty cache flushing behaviour for the L1 algorithm in write-back mode? Specifically, is there any sort of automated timeout for dirty cache blocks, such that they are flushed out of cache after a certain maximum time period? Or can dirty cache blocks sit t...