VSAN Free bare metal and FC

[CombFiltered]

I got a lot of FC (fibre channel for those trying to search in the future) equipment for cheap, and would like to see what I can make work with VSAN and my homelab. I have the bare metal Ubuntu build. I apologize for questions in here that will likely be uninformed, but I'm trying to learn this in a homelab setup.

I found a guide for setting up FC, but it seems to be for Red Hat flavors of Linux. Would I only need to adapt the commands (i.e. apt instead of yum), or is there a fundamental change to make this work on the Ubuntu builds of VSAN?

My goal would be to try storing VM images on the storage system, taking advantage of the FC infrastructure. It seems LUNs are not possible with the free edition, since I'm getting a message saying "The functionality is not licensed" for anything to do with LUNs. I didn't see this called out on the limitations of Free - is this correct, or does this have something to do with my setup?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Greetings,

Welcome to StarWind Forum. The article you referred to describes use of FC for VTL, not VSAN.
StarWind VSAN does not work over FC, it works only over iSCSI and soon over NVMe-oF.
You are welcome to book a call and learn more about our products from the demo https://www.starwindsoftware.com/v17-request-live-demo.

[CombFiltered]

Am I completely misunderstanding this then that says VSAN can use FC?
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/fibre-channel

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

Yes, StarWind VSAN cannot publish the storage over the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol.
Now, most of the systems use iSCSI.

[CombFiltered]

You probably want to update this documentation then. I don't know how I'm reading all this so wrong, when it's flat out not supported.

"StarWind VSAN uses Fibre Channel for sharing Highly Available storage for applications and VMs"

[CombFiltered]

The article you referred to describes use of FC for VTL, not VSAN.

Could you please expand on this? The article is referencing both VSAN and VTL, and connecting them via FC. In fact, the stated Purpose of the entire document is "This document guides users in configuring StarWind storage device and VTL device and sharing them as a FC targets, so they can be used in FC infrastructure with minimum latency and the highest performance." Then follows up with "The result of following this guide is that users will have StarWind VSAN devices shared via FC protocol."

What am I missing?

[yaroslav (staff)]

HA devices are not available over the Fiber Channel.

"The result of following this guide is that users will have StarWind VSAN devices shared via FC protocol."

VTL is a component of the VSAN. Technically, VTL is still the standalone VSAN target however it uses different libraries. The same applies to FC, theoretically.
Yet, HA devices do not work over FC.
Now, you can use iSCSI or wait for NVMe-oF beta (should be there soon, stay tuned).

[CombFiltered]

HA devices are not available over the Fiber Channel.
...
Yet, HA devices do not work over FC.

What is this document discussing? https://www.starwindsoftware.com/fibre-channel
"StarWind VSAN can utilize the existing Fibre Channel infrastructure to bring in the required High Availability, using StarWind active-active storage replication. This way, the existing Fibre Channel-based infrastructure remains intact, providing shared storage for clients, while StarWind handles synchronous replication. As a result, there is no need to invest in new hardware and reconstruct the exciting infrastructure to implement alternative storage protocols."
...
"StarWind can "talk" not only Fibre Channel but also such modern storage protocols like iSCSI and NVMe-oF."
...
"StarWind Introduces High Availability into Fibre Channel Storage"
...
"StarWind VSAN uses Fibre Channel for sharing Highly Available storage for applications and VMs"

Is there some sort of wrapper I'm missing in my understanding here? In the graphic on the page, how does the VSAN connect to the FC switches, and then to the virtualization hosts?

[CombFiltered]

I found this StorageReview article from July 2022 that used FC in a SAN & NAS implementation test.
https://www.storagereview.com/review/st ... re-channel

This article also links to one of your blog posts, where you announced FC implementation. "Installed either on top of hypervisor of your choice or bare-metal, it turns your server into a fast shared storage pool that can be accessed over iSCSI, SMB or NFS. And in the new build, via FC as well."
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/s ... -vs-graid/

Your legacy product page for SAN & NAS says all functionality was carried over to VSAN. It looks like that happened about a year ago judging from the build date.

I'm trying to piece everything together here, but lots of things don't seem to be adding up to me.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

I guess there is a slight misunderstanding here as SAN&NAS was never featuring highly available storage.
From what I know, highly available storage cannot be published over FC.
Let me discuss this internally.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

We will update the information on the website soon. Thanks a lot!

[CombFiltered]

I take that as no FC then?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Sadly, yes.