Is it Possible to achieve Hyper-V FT with StarWind Virtual SAN Free Version?

[MichaelLin]

We have setup a lab with 2 pair of Win2K12 R2 Hyper-V, and 2 pair of StarWind Virtual SAN Free version. Both pairs are all setup with Windows Failover Cluster.

For StarWind, we create a File Share with Failover Cluster so we can achieve File Server FT.
For Hyper-V, we setup SMB connect to StarWind cluster file share to achieve Live Migration and also VM HA.

Since Free version is compute and storage separated, so we setup like this and it works great. Although I am not quite sure if I have done it right? Because I cannot achieve Hyper-V FT, I turn off one hyper-V host and the VM on it will reboot and function as HA fail over to another host.

I was think that maybe it is because I did not attached replicated Target to Hyper-V directly. However, when I tried to attached a StarWind repliceted Target to Hyper-V host, it failed all the time. The event log will show "License restriction". I am not be able to attach to it. If I removed the replication, I will be able to attach to it.

My setup was exactly compute and storage seperated, how come I just cannot attach the replicated iSCSI Target to the hyper-V host? My understand was that if I am be able to attached replicated iSCSI Target to hyper-V, I should be able to achieve hyper-V FT. I am not quite sure if this restriction got some to do with the limitation function of "High available iSCSI". If it is then why it can be available for the StarWind node itself to achieve File Server FT with Windows Fail over cluster?

I am not quite sure what I have done wrong. Is it Possible to achieve Hyper-V FT with StarWind Virtual SAN Free Version?

Thank you for taking your time.

[anton (staff)]

You don't do iSCSI within this scenario! You configure "shared nothing" Scale-Out File Server w/out SAS JBOD and using only internally attached SATA / SAS / NVMe disks and flash. Something like on the guide below:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/sw-con ... le-servers

At the end of the day you'll get an equivalent of a dual controller SMB3 NAS (SAN?) and OF COURSE it will be 100% fault tolerant. Hope this helped a bit

[MichaelLin]

Thank you for pointing out my mistake. When you mentioned that "You don't do iSCSI within this scenario." I don't really get it. You mentioned that when I configure failover cluster for file server actually was using SOFS. However, I did not use SOFS instead I configure as "File Server for general use". If I don't configure in the way which I have done for 2 pairs, how I can achieve "Compute and Storage separated" and also have the LUN replication function with FT capability for VM.

Maybe it is not important for what I have done. I should said that what are the proper (correct) configuration steps to achieve Hyper-V FT (if not maybe HA) with Startwind virtual SAN free version? We are helping customer build different hypervisor platforms. The same questions will apply to Xenserver and VMware. Can we achieve VM FT with Starwind solution in all these three platforms? What's the different between Free and Paid version regards on FT capability.

[PoSaP]

Hi
About difference between free and paid version you can find here: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitep ... s-paid.pdf
I hope it will help.

[Dmitry (staff)]

@PoSaP thanks for your help
@MichaelLin do not hesitate to ask any additional questions.