Nic teaming, load balancing and Fail-over?

[Dana2011]

We have a lab with physical custom servers Noroco 4220 case with 20 bays, ASUS server motherboard with dual Intel Xeon CPU sockets, 18 DIMMS and 48 GB of RAM DDR3, Adaptec RAID Controller 31605,15 Hitachi HDD, Intel E1G44ETBLK Gigabit ET Quad Port Server Adapter and Dell PowerConnect 2848 Managed Switch. We want to install Starwind on top of Server 2008 in ESXi host and we want to have a best performance for networking.

1. What do you recommend for Nic teaming, load balancing and Fail-over?
2. Which is a best solution to put OS in RAID or on separate SSD just for OS and Starwind?

Thanks!

[anton (staff)]

1) Teaming has tendency not to work as expected. So now yes, try NIC teaming checking tunnel performance for TCP first. Upcoming versions of StarWind will have multiple routing paths and Round-Robin load balancing supported so NO teaming is going to work faster and more reliable. V5.7 I guess...

2) Put OS boot on cheap RAID. OS boot is not expected to happen often. Keep SSD for de-duplication metadata level 2 cache (level 1 is RAM).

[Dana2011]

Thank you and do you know when 5.7 version is coming up ?
Regards,

[Max (staff)]

Hi, as far as I've heard 5.7 will be released by the end of March.

[Dana2011]

Thanks !

[anton (staff)]

You're welcomed to get hands over pre-release version (when we'll have one). If you want please drop us a message to support@starwindsoftware.com referencing you'd like to take part in Beta program and we'll be happy to help Thank you!