One large iSCSI target or multiple small ones?

matty-ct · Thu Nov 05, 2009 1:56 pm

Has anyone encountered stability problems with large LUN's? I have a 800GB img being used for Hyper-V clustering (only 2 VM's during testing.) Server is a W2K8R2 EE on a new Intel brand server running hardware RAID 10 of 4 1TB enterprise drives. For me, the Starwind service crashes once every few days, thus bringing down the house of cards. There's nothing in any Windows log other than the Starwind svc crash, no hardware or Windows errors of any kind (save for cluster resources going offline after Starwind.) Starwind support has looked at a few logs and a mini-dump but hasn't figured it out yet. The only non-MS software on the server is Intel RAID management console and Starwind. I doubt that 800GB should be an issue, though. Thoughts?

Robert (staff) · Thu Nov 05, 2009 2:36 pm

I'm splitting the topic since this is sort of another story...

Have you tried updating your StarWind version to the latest build? Also, does this happen with 4.2 or with 5.0? Does the OS just freeze or it simply says "Application does not respond". The latter can happen with StarWind and other applications which is quite normal. A couple of minutes later the application becomes "alive" again.

Thanks.

matty-ct · Thu Nov 05, 2009 7:28 pm

Yeah, I was somewhat hesitant to do post it in the same thread as it's probably not related, the more I think about it. All the evidence I have is that the Starwind service crashes. That's it. Nothing else in the system log, application log, or any other Windows logging. Of course, when the Starwind service stops, this kills the LUNs and thus the cluster resources. There is no Windows crash or restart or any other error. Everything keeps on chugging save for iSCSI related services. Starwind management console still works. If I restart the service I can go back to cluster admin, bring the drives back on-line, and then restart Hyper-V vm's with no problem. I sent Bob Boule a log file and mini-dump last week, but I haven't heard anything back yet. I know you guys are busy with the 5.0 rollout. When this first appeared in early Oct, I was sent an updated version (v4.2.3 I think?) Didn't make a difference. Upgraded to v5.0 a few days ago and it has occurred twice since then. I can't seem to correlate it to anything. Oddly, there are no other Windows 'hiccups' other than the Starwind crash. I haven't tried a full uninstall and reinstall, yet.

When perusing various software vendors' forums, I am usually amused by users experiencing problems when the vast majority might use the software with no errors. I suppose I'll have a bit more compassion now!

Thanks,

Matt

Robert (staff) · Tue Nov 10, 2009 1:13 pm

Matt,

You are right when saying that there is really a lot of users that don't experience any crashes while using StarWind. The service can really work for months and months without a single failure. I will follow-up with Bob on the status of your issues so that we could get this resolved.

Thanks.