Migration from stand alone to 2 node

Software-based VM-centric and flash-friendly VM storage + free version

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mdcollins
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2015 3:00 am

Fri Sep 11, 2015 3:22 am

Hello

I am hoping someone will be able to give me a clear path as the options seem to have changed with different versions of the software and how its marketed. Also first let me say I love what we have been using so far and appreciate the folks that let small companies get their feet wet with shared storage for free. We have been running off a single node of Starwinds for some of our shared storage for our test lab for the last couple years. Its run flawlessly. Because it has run so well we are looking into moving it within the next year into production, but we need to test as a HA platform before we risk our clients data. In our current lab we have upgraded to the newest build of 8 and are putting together a identical host to mirror to. So, based on this, these are my questions.
1. Is LSFS ready for prime time, looking in the forum and the internet it seems like its been in development for some time and has made large gains. Is it ready for a production environment. Our test servers will have around 20TB of RAID 10 storage, 128GB of RAM each and 640GB of SSD storage for L2 cache.
2. In what I have read it appears that if we move to LSFS we need to allow for 4.5GB of RAM per TB of defined storage, is this separate from whatever we might assign to L1 cache per TB?
3. It seems like it used to be the recommendation to enable L2 cache write back, but it seems like the current thinking is write thru, is this correct?
4. If we wanted to take our current lab server that is all setup and running using iSCSI, in what I believe you refer to a compute and storage model, do we need to wipe it or can we continue to use iSCSI? This seams a area I am confused. I have seem in older posts where the recommendation was to not use NFS on top of iSCSI for VMWare, and to not use VMWare's vSphere with NFS with Starwinds. But it seem like if I read the current version directions correctly the recommendation is to use the NFS and you cannot use iSCSI for the free version, is this correct? Do we have to stop using iSCSI? How will this impact us? The version of VMWare we are running is 4.1.

Thank you for your time.
Michael Collins
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darklight
Posts: 185
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2015 2:04 pm

Wed Sep 16, 2015 8:53 am

1) Actually LSFS will be ready for production (at least for me) with the upcoming build. Guys from StarWind told on the forum that LSFS will be significantly revamped in the upcoming build.
2) Yeah, it's separate. It's for defrag/dedup/journaling/aligning whatever.
3) L2 cache should be write-through as per best practices
4) You can use NFS but it's not a MS supported scenario i believe.
Vladislav (Staff)
Staff
Posts: 180
Joined: Fri Feb 27, 2015 4:31 pm

Wed Sep 16, 2015 10:03 pm

darklight, thank you for sharing your knowledge with others :)

Michael, do you have any questions?
mdcollins
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2015 3:00 am

Sat Sep 26, 2015 12:23 pm

I do have a couple questions.
1. Any estimate on when the next build might be initiated?
2. So for the free version we are not forced to go to NFS, we can continue to use iSCSI for the two node scenario?

Thank You
mdcollins
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2015 3:00 am

Sat Oct 03, 2015 11:21 am

Sorry to ask again, but will we be force to leave iSCSI and use either the NFS or SMB solution and upgrade our Starwinds server to 2012 if we want to implement two node mirroring under the free license?

Thank You
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darklight
Posts: 185
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2015 2:04 pm

Tue Oct 06, 2015 1:05 pm

It's a pity, but latest free version does not support iSCSI anymore. Only SMB/NFS, and only dedicated.
mdcollins
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2015 3:00 am

Tue Oct 06, 2015 5:06 pm

Appreciate the info. Do you know if this can be done with Windows 2008 R2? Or am I going to be forced to move to server 2012? I am more familiar with the iSCSI side, I hate the idea of having to rebuild the SAN again when I just got it running so well under Windows 2008 R2 with the new version using iSCSI. I have to say I don't understand this thinking. If your trying to build a system to later get approval for the full version, you would want something that your not going to have to pull it from a limited production environment and redo it, seems like it would make more sense to let you use iSCSI if that was going to be your initial design so you could easily scale from free to paid. I cannot complain, its a great product and I hope to be able to move to the paid version sometime in the near future, I don't understand the iSCSI limitation.

Thank You
nohope
Posts: 18
Joined: Tue Sep 29, 2015 8:26 am

Tue Oct 13, 2015 10:20 am

Going with Windows Server 2008 R2 won't allow you to build Scale-out File Server, just because of it only supports SMB 2.0, while SMB 3.0 is required for this purpose. Your certainly can create shared file storage with SMB 2.0, however it won't failover. All these constraints confuse me, occasionally. Anyway, Windows Server 2012 is described by having strong benefits, and I, personally, have not face any problems, running Starwind free on top of it. But, actually, it's up to you :)
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Tarass (Staff)
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Posts: 113
Joined: Mon Oct 06, 2014 10:40 am

Fri Nov 13, 2015 3:25 pm

Thanks, Nohope!

Should you have any further questions guys, do not hesitate to ask.
Senior Technical Support Engineer
StarWind Software Inc.
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