Windows requirements - does it run on server core? And more.

[Thona]

I am still / again in the market for an ISCSI solution, now that R2 is out with cluster shared storage

Can I install Starwind on a server core? Given the problems of having a time window to reboot a central ISCSI device.... (which means taking down all associated virtual machines and servers booting from it) it looks like a smart way to get rid of as many patches as possible. And given how rarely I had to reboot my server core in the last year... compared to a full windows server.... I would really HATE having my ISCSI server on a full server.

High availablilty with live mirroring - does that work with disc pass through? Given that I have no need for thin provisioning anymore (as devices will be either VHD files on a clustered shared volume, small VHD files for the virtual server operating systems to run (say: 16gb, most likely - more is not needed) or pass through volumes (for basically database servers - for which the usage of image files is bordering stupid on the scenario I have because i need basically dedicated hardware for them anyway - IO requirements are extremely terrible) I mostly am interested in whether I can make physical RAID arrays highly available.

Any finally... Given decent hardware - what is the IO limit reached and has this been tested with high bandwidth connections (i.e. way in excess to 1gbit - I think of 10gbit / infiniband adapters). The most tricky questions, though, is IOPS - I am working on a database server that has to store (mind you, NOT relational - that ends up in blobs mostly) around 250.000 data items - sadly per second, and distributed over about 1.5 million different streams (most of which are pretty inactive, some of which are REALLY active, 1000 to 2000 entries per second). Even with all optimization I can do in memory... the IO performance in different operations per second may be a little - hm - critical.

[Robert (staff)]

Hello,

Well, StarWind server will work with 2008 core, however, we have just a few guidelines available right now for the installation and configuration.

As for the mirroring, you can set any remote iSCSI targets as mirror devices, including Disk Bridge and SPTI.

We haven't tested StarWind on 10GB Ethernet yet, neither or Infiniband. Moreover, if Infiniband works in the native mode without TCP/IP layer on top of that - StarWind will not work with it. For 1 gb ethernet - there are still good old recomendations from this thread http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... -t792.html

Thanks

[Thona]

Thanks.

Just as info: the most common use of Infiniband is as an ethernet replacement (i.e. using a LAN simulation on top, running then... IP). The main reason to still do that is raw power - we talk of VERY low latencies here (measured in millions of a second, once the session is established) and tremendous bandwidth (up to 40gbit iirc). On top, it is decently priced if you have motherboard support - external cards are expensive, but Supermicro (as example) has many boards with optional infiniband (on the board, not as additional card) for not exactly a LOT more money than without

Great to hear about mirroring anything and especially great about server core. The differences core/non-core are ridiculous - I managed to get around 90 days uptime with my server core machines... without even trying Most updates today seem to be UI Related in some sort.

I look forward trying that out. WIll give it a try the next days.

[Aitor_Ibarra]

Hi Thona,

Really interesting about what you say as Infiniband as an Ethernet replacement. I read that the Mellanox chips that Supermicro are doing on their systems equipped with 40Gbit Infiniband could emulate Ethernet, but I haven't seen confirmation of this within Windows - they would have to have proper driver support etc. Also, how would switching work? What's the equivalent of a managed L2/L3 switch?

Anyway, I've been using Starwind with 10GbE for months now and I can say that performance rocks! In production it's rare for utilisation to go beyond 25% but I did do some tests which proved to me, anyway, that iSCSI and Starwind aren't bottlenecks. I saw about 900MB/sec when going from Hyper-V VM -> Windows iSCSI -> 10GbE -> 10Gbe switch -> 10 GbE -> Starwind -> Starwind RAM disk, although I had to use multiple RAM disks because each one seemed to be using one thread, so without multiples I was limited by MHz rather than core count. My raid controller has a huge cache so I can hit that speed in production when doing large writes, without needing mutliple volumes but obvioulsy reads aren't so good as they involve hard disks...

To get the best performance (especially IOPs) turn off the Windows firewall at both ends (if you are running the network as dedicated for iSCSI, this shouldn't be a risk), as doing stateful packet inspection on that kind of traffic will limit your top speed. Unless you have faster CPUs than me I guess.

It's true that with SSDs and good raid controllers you will max out 10GbE with just a few disks, but you could get around this by using multiple volumes and multiple 10GbE connections - e.g. with a db split your data and logs across mutliple volumes, or use software RAID at the initiator end.

For your db app, I don't suppose you have enough RAM to keep entire db in memory? That will sort out read performance, and then on the Starwind box, an Areca 1680ix with 4GB cache will give you roughly 4 seconds of burst writes at 1GB/sec before you have to worry about disk performance!

cheers,

Aitor

[Aitor_Ibarra]

PS, Robert - could you post a link to guidelines for running on server core? Can the Starwind UI run on server core (or another machine via RPC), or does the config have to be done with config files only?

[Robert (staff)]

Aitor,

We don't have the guidelines available for Core, but there is a file called StarWind configuration.doc in C:Program Files\StarWind Software\StarWind . The doc explains how to run starwindservice.exe using cdm.

Thanks