Starwind HA and nested iSCSI

[Aitor_Ibarra]

Hi,

Is this scenario supported? Anyone tried it?

On each Starwind 5 HA node, use Windows iSCSI initiator to mount an iSCSI target as a local disk. Target could be on another Starwind installation, or any other iSCSI target.

Then use Starwind 5 HA to store an HA img target on that disk.

This would be a way of leveraging non-ha iscsi targets to make them highly available. E.g if someone has invested in a bunch of Dell MD3000i boxes, and then realises they need geographical ha (one box in each datacenter), which the MD3000i does not support, they could use Starwind 5 HA to front end them.

It would work best if HA worked with pass through disks as well as img, but it would still be very cool.

cheers,

Aitor

[Constantin (staff)]

If I understood you properly you want to store HA target inside HA target? I think that perfomance of such solution will be very poor

[Aitor_Ibarra]

Hi Constantin,

I have before mounted an iSCSI target using MS initiator on the same server as Starwind, and actually got pretty good results. I've definitely done it when Starwind is in a VM and the initiator is on the physical host, I think I also tried it with Starwind and initiator both in physical windows instance (no VMs). That's what gave me the idea.

It wouldn't be as good performance as directly connected storage, but as I've never had a speed issue with Starwind (and could see it scaling with more cores thrown at it and faster networks and disks), I don't think it would be unacceptably bad. It might be useful for adding emergency expansion storage. E.g. if I've run out of disks on my starwind box, but have a spare disk on another couple of servers, just present them as iSCSI targets, use the MS initiator on the Starwind box to present them to Windows as local disks, and then use Starwind to store .imgs on. Once I get HA working reliably I will try it out!

cheers,

Aitor

[Constantin (staff)]

Please, inform about results )