Dell Powervault MD3000 support?

[mreeds]

Can we leverage our Dell Powervault MD3000 (JBOD) using Starwind or do we still need to create CIFs mount via an Openfiler like app?

[Robert (staff)]

Hello,

Can you provide more details for your scenario?

Thanks,
Rob

[florian]

This topic is important to me as it relates to the direction in which our firm is going.

The Dell MD3000 is a disk array that can be used as directly attached storage or NAS and hopefully a
StarWind SAN. The administration of a MD3000 allows you to create "logical disks" that can be attached via
Microsoft Disk Management to the server where it is physically attached via a SCSI connection.

Therefore, my plan is to add additional disks to our MD3000, create multiple "logical disks" and then use
StarWind to create a SAN with each of those logical disks. Then we would separately add a disk or multiple
disks to other servers in our network.

However, our testing is not going well. To simulate the above, I have done these things:
- added a raw disk to an XP Pro machine
- used Microsoft Disk Management to create multiple partitions on the disk
- used StarWind to connect a Disk Bridge
- used StarPort on several other XP Pro machines to do Remote iSCSI connections


The problem issues are I understand them are:
- StarWind had created the Disk Bridge using the whole disk, not just the partitions created
- StarPort has connected the whole disk to each of the other machines, showing all partitions on each machine
- XP Pro machines using StarPort are locking up to the point that only a 7 second hold of reset button gets the machine going


Now, before you tell me how stupid this scenario has been, please remember that I have not found detailed
documentation on what is the correct implementation scenario but that is probably because I am only using
demo / test versions of the software. The forums have provided the best answers to the problems that I have
encountered so far.

I am unable to test on the MD3000 as it is production; I have to make this scenario work on the XP Pro machines
in order to ensure that StarWind & StarPort are the answer to my virtual storage needs.

Thanks for reading.

[Robert (staff)]

Hello florian,

There is really nothing stupid in what you have done. That's why we actually run the forum - to share the knowledge and spread best practices of StarWind implementation.

1. Truly, Disk Bridge reserves the entire physical disk (not the partitions) and reserves it for using via iSCSI. If you need to allocate a separate partition or part of the partition, you can use Image File Devices or Mirror (RAID-1) devices.

2. Also, Please note that if you are creating concurrent connection and data read/write mode by simultaneous access of several initiators to the same image file or an image file, this is not recommended. This will cause data corruption and make the data inside the file inconsistent.

In order to avoid this, you can do one of the following:

- Either create separate image files per every initiator and allow one
connection only per image, or
- Use Cluster services (such as MS Cluster Service), dedicated SAN file
systems (Data Plow SFS, etc.) or software, allowing NTFS to be used as SAN
file system (MetaSAN, or alike).

You can refer to the documentation on using MetaSAN and Dataplow to share
iSCSI targets:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/images/ ... etaSAN.pdf
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/images/ ... nd_SFS.pdf

Please let us know if that helps.

Thank you
Rob