Disk Preperation

[ADarkDividedGem]

Hi,

Before I go ahead and buy my hardware I was reading through the Getting Started guide for a Hyper-converged 2 Node Cluster with Hyper-V

Step 22 mentions the following:

StarWind Management console will ask you to specify the default storage pool on the server you’re connecting to for the first time. Please configure the default storage pool to use one of the volumes you have prepared earlier. All the devices created through the Add Device wizard will be stored on it.
...
NOTE: Each of the arrays which will be used by StarWind Virtual SAN to store virtual disk
images should meet the following requirements:

• • Initialized as GPT
  • Have a single NTFS-formatted partition
  • Have a drive letter assigned

My server will have 1 mSATA disk which will contains the OS and 4 other SSD drives will be available for the storage. Would this mean to use the combined space of all 4 SSD drives they would need to have been configured into as a RAID 10 drive at this point? Otherwise it looks like I would only be able to create a storage pool the size of the individual disk.

Thanks

[Boris (staff)]

ADarkDividedGem, RAID10 would give you half of your total capacity as usable. According to StarWind Best Practices Guide https://www.starwindsoftware.com/techni ... ctices.pdf (page 18) you can use RAID5 in your all-flash setup instead of RAID10. Thus you will have 3 disks capacity as usable, which cbasically means +1 disk available for storage.

[ADarkDividedGem]

Thanks Boris for the helpful reply, I see the document also mentions the following:

Software RAID controllers are not supported for use with StarWind Virtual SAN

Since I plan on using Intel Rapid Storage Technology would I still be able to use RAID with StarWind Virtual SAN?

[Sergey (staff)]

Yes, you are absolutely right, software RAID controllers are not supported for use with StarWind Virtual SAN.
We recommend building RAID using hardware RAID controller. There is no preferred vendor, therefore, StarWind recommends using RAID controllers from any industry-standard vendor.