Best Home Lab (v8)

[BenMitchell1979]

I'm trying to build a great home lab and looking at either Starwind SAN Free v8(running on 2012R2) or NexentaStorCE v4. Two ESXi Hosts (Dell R710 2xQC w/ 66g RAM) and storage is Dell T620 1x 6core w 24g RAM & Onboard SATA = 1x 60g SSD (OS) and 1x 60g SSD (potential 2nd Cache), 1st Perc H310 = 8x750g SATAIII (Raid10), 2nd Perc H310 = 8x300g 15k SAS (R5), and PercS310= 4x 120g SSD (RAID0). Each Host has 2x 1g direct attach Ethernet to the T620.

Questions I have:
- Does StarWind Free v8 support VAAI (NexentaStor does along with FC Targeting - both big pluses)?
- What iSCSI primitives are supported in ESXi?
- Are there any gotchas to the 2nd level cache via SSD? Limits or capabilities?
- DeDuplication is listed as "beta - use at own risk" - can I utilize the Dedupe on 2012R2 versus starwind or is Starwind DeDupe really ready?
- Is there a way to utilize as FC Target?


Regards,
Ben Mitchell

[anton (staff)]

1) Yes, free version does VAAI (ODX is coming soon just for reference)

2) You mean SCSI commands VAAI engine support? Copy, atomic lock and zero out AFAIK

3) No. Except with a single host (controller) it's not recommended to have RAM as a write back so have decent performance you'll have to use flash as a write-back and it's going to burn your MLC flash soon. Think about going other way: throw in extra host, enable sync replication between them (StarWind) and use huge RAM cache in write-back mode (spoofing) doing load adsorb and assign write-thru for flash (accelerate READs with it, RAM takes care of WRITEs). That's your way to go

4) Dedupe is not beta anymore. Where did you find "use @ your own risks" thing?

5) We're not FC shop so cannot expose FC target. You can use FC to place StarWind IMGs (and VHDX soon) on it however

BTW, take a look here:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2 ... isn-t-free

Good luck!

I'm trying to build a great home lab and looking at either Starwind SAN Free v8(running on 2012R2) or NexentaStorCE v4. Two ESXi Hosts (Dell R710 2xQC w/ 66g RAM) and storage is Dell T620 1x 6core w 24g RAM & Onboard SATA = 1x 60g SSD (OS) and 1x 60g SSD (potential 2nd Cache), 1st Perc H310 = 8x750g SATAIII (Raid10), 2nd Perc H310 = 8x300g 15k SAS (R5), and PercS310= 4x 120g SSD (RAID0). Each Host has 2x 1g direct attach Ethernet to the T620.

Questions I have:
- Does StarWind Free v8 support VAAI (NexentaStor does along with FC Targeting - both big pluses)?
- What iSCSI primitives are supported in ESXi?
- Are there any gotchas to the 2nd level cache via SSD? Limits or capabilities?
- DeDuplication is listed as "beta - use at own risk" - can I utilize the Dedupe on 2012R2 versus starwind or is Starwind DeDupe really ready?
- Is there a way to utilize as FC Target?


Regards,
Ben Mitchell

[BenMitchell1979]

Thank you for your fast reply!!

- Are there any good step-by-step guides for deploying from a single host via iSCSI? I know I can't be the only person having issues with getting it stood up (not a storage guy).
- My hosts can see my MS ISCSI luns but not the starwind luns so I know that networking and vmware settings are good. I'm not sure what I'm over looking (other than I don't see where I tell StarWind Target to except connections from the IQN of my hosts).
- Are there any known issues with the VAAI support? Read somewhere where it can cause instability on the ESXi host when used.
- Do I need to install a VIB/Drivers for my ESXi host to utilize the VAAI and do you guys have/plan to offer a plugin for vCenter for managing SAN Server?
- By COPY support via VAAI - I'm hoping you mean when I initiate a clone/deploy from template all the work stays on the the storage end vs Using the VMKernel Data Mover driver and dropping the workload to the host (most important primitive outside of ATS)
- The DeDupe "use at own risk - was on a blog I was reading about issues users had with the beta of v8. What is the block size used by DeDupe in StarWind (is it configurable)?
- For L2 Cache - I was going to go with the 10% rule of thumb. 1g of SSD for every 10g of Storage. So each of my 500g Devices will have a 50g SSD L2 Cache - is that a good ratio?

[anton (staff)]

1) You can use V6 manuals as we still use iSCSI to feed shared storage to ESXi... or drop me a PM and I'll bring you in touch with the guys who'll provide you with a documents we'll publish soon.

2) That's because you run both MS iSCSI and StarWind on the same host an they fight for the same 3260 port. Make sure you run them bonded to a different ports and you'll be fine.

3) VAAI is reported stable so far.

4) We don't need any drivers and we do indeed have plans to have a vCenter plug-in soon (with SCVMM we use SMI-S so we're already there for Hyper-V)

5) Copy should do fine

6) That was for beta probably. We're not in Kansas anymore (c)

7) Should be fine! 10% is good enough.

[BenMitchell1979]

2) That's because you run both MS iSCSI and StarWind on the same host an they fight for the same 3260 port. Make sure you run them bonded to a different ports and you'll be fine. <-- I should have thought of that...

[anton (staff)]

NP

Both can do that AFAIK.

2) That's because you run both MS iSCSI and StarWind on the same host an they fight for the same 3260 port. Make sure you run them bonded to a different ports and you'll be fine. <-- I should have thought of that...