StarWind SAN & NAS Free - Questions

[tjs4ever]

Hello, I'm interested in reworking the storage for my home lab and I've stumbled across StarWind SAN and NAS. I'm hoping the pros on here can give me some pointers and maybe steer me in the right direction.

I have two servers : a HP DL380p Gen 8 running esxi 6.5 with a HP P822 raid card, I'm running it with only one 8c/16t CPU and 128GB RAM. The raid card is connected to a HP D2600 12-bay DAS which has 8x10TB drives in RAID6 and nets me about 54TB of storage. This 54TB is assigned to one Windows server VM via RDM. I'm then sharing out the storage through windows via DFS.

Second server is for Veeam backups, the veeam machine is a HP Gen7 running bare metal windows server and it has its own 12-bay DAS, a MSA60 with hardware raid and mixed drives which are setup as one large dynamic disk in Windows.

This setup has been working well for me but I am running low on disk space on both servers. I've recently learned that esxi won't work with a drive larger than 64TB so it looks like I need to move away from hardware raid.

I bought 12x14TB SATA drives on black Friday and I will make a veeam backup, shut down veaam, put the veeam drives in storage and experiment with the empty msa60 12-bay DAS. I'm hoping if something goes terribly wrong I can put everything back to the original configuration and perform a veaam restore.

I have a HP H221 HBA that I will passthrough to the StarWind VM, and I plan to setup one pool consisting of two raidz1 vdev with 6x14TB each. I'm hoping my available 80GB RAM and single CPU will be enough.

How do I continue to share my storage using windows? Would I isci from Starwind VM to the windows VM? Or can Starwind create shares directly? Would I be able to continue to use veeam to backup my entire Gen8 and all attached disks?

The D2600 is faster than the MSA60 so I'm also hoping that I can easily move the drives from one to the other. Over the next few weeks I plan to perform these steps

1. Make a veeam backup and empty out the 12 bay MSA60.
2. Deploy starwind VM - anything special for network settings or the defaults are OK? I don't need HA, I have 3x1gbe nic for vm network and 1xgbe for vmware mgmt.
3. pass-through the HBA, connect MSA60 and new drives.
4. Copy data from hw raid to Starwind
5. Physically swap the locations of the drives (MSA60 to D2600)
6. Resume veeam backups, I will repurpose my old 10TB drives for veeam assuming everything goes 100%

[yaroslav (staff)]

StarWind SAN & NAS is intended for ESXi https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... n-and-nas/
You still can connect the storage to a Windows Server VM over iSCSI. You can also use StarWind VSAN (non-replicated scenario is also possible) right on top of Windows VM and connect the storage over 127.0.0.1. Underlying storage can be connected as an RDM drive so you do not need to form a VMFS datastore on top. If you plan for replication, you need 2 servers; see more on StarWind VSAN best practices https://www.starwindsoftware.com/best-p ... practices/ and system requirements https://www.starwindsoftware.com/system-requirements. See more on backup best practices https://www.starwindsoftware.com/best-p ... practices/.

[tjs4ever]

yaroslav,

Thank you for reading my very long post and for your prompt reply. It sounds like vsan might be a better fit for me, would you agree? RDM back to windows server would be ideal for me.

Am I able to run vsan as a vm with the free edition? I'm an IT Professional but this project is just home lab, and a bit outside of my usual wheelhouse. I've read over the recommendations but I'm not sure if much of it applies since I will have only one node and one esxi host. Specifically I'm not clear on what's needed for networking. I have 4x 1gbe total on the server: 1xgbe for esxi mgmt and 3xgbe for vm network. Link aggregation is enabled on my switch.

Will vsan data go over network to RDM to windows VM?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

Am I able to run vsan as a vm with the free edition?

Yes. See StarWind VSAN free v. StarWind VSAN Commercial comparison at https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... e-vs-paid/. You can also request a trial key to play around with GUI, BUT you will not be able to revert to free version without reinstalling the software afresh.

As a standalone deployment, you do not need to worry about the NIC requirements. Just make sure your Windows VM has 8x vCPU, 8 GB RAM. Also, make sure not to use Write Back cache for your devices due to a good risk of data loss in standalone deployments. See more about caching here https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... rinciples/.
The only thing that may need a dedicated link in your case is the iSCSI network.

Will vsan data go over network to RDM to windows VM?

No, they will go over the VM storage controller.

[tjs4ever]

Yaroslav,

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. Would I be eligible for a NFR license for vsan? It looks like the free version does not include a gui which is something that I might have to rely on.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Greetings,

Please contact us at support@starwind.com use this thread and 605635 number as a reference.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Small update: No, we do not support L1/L2 cache in SAN & NAS, thus there is no option to create the configuration.