starwind v8 with cache 40G on 1Gx4 nics

[lenovo31]

hi all,

i notice that on 1g nic x4 plus 1 mngt, with 40g ssd cache, the sync is still about 5-6 hours, on 1tb 1g write-back san. it's a two nodes.

if that the case, after synching 20%, can it run some vms already with ease or not? is there more tweak i can to do make this faster besides the one shown on the youtube about round robin/iops=1/disk=512... i'm on esxi 5.5.

fyi,
i have another san with 2x10G on each node, its a 2 nodes, the sync is only about 2 hours with 60G ssd cache, of course i used dvswitch to make 4 nics out of 2x 10G, meaning I divided it with ratio of 10g 50% and 50% for iscsi x2 and 10g 50% and 50% for sync x2, on 1tb 1g write-back san.

[Michael (staff)]

Hello lenovo31,

The synchronization time usually depends on underlying storage performance, the size of StarWind device, the throughput of the Synchronization channel and Production workload to the storage, during the Synchronization process. It does not matter what cache size you have configured there. So, I would recommend you to check underlying storage performance first.
It is obvious that underlying storage is under significant workload during the Synchronization process, thus the VMs on it will work a little bit slower during the whole Synchronization process.
In case if you have a HyperConverged scenario on VMWare and you have StarWind VMs on it, I would recommend configuring disks for StarWind VMs and future StarWind storage as Thick Provision Eager Zeroed because this setting has significant influence to whole system performance.
As for the network configuration, it is recommended to set up a dedicated NICs for Synchronization and iSCSI channels and make sure that you have enabled jumbo frames on it.