Native SAN sizing requirements

[rrnworks]

Hello,

We are curious how to properly size a very small and simple 2 node Native SAN for Hyper-v. It will run a single SQL 2008 R2 server vm, 6GB RAM. 50GB database. I noticed the minimum CPU listed by starwind specifically is the E5620 and 4GB RAM:
1. For just a single low use vm would a E5603 suffice? Or is starwind overly dependent on the CPU and even a E5620 may not suffice?
2. Should we plan on just 4GB RAM 'extra' for starwind itself? We would allocate 6GB for the vm and 4GB for Hyper-v.
3. Hard drives seem to be the least specific starwind requirement while in my experience storage is the major bottleneck while the CPU is the minor bottleneck. Just curious why it seems to be more the reverse for Starwind requirements?

Also, is this the best resource for getting started? http://www.starwindsoftware.com/ns-conf ... erver-2012

Thanks!
Chris

[anton (staff)]

1) It's OK. Just don't enable deduplication in this case as it will burn your CPU.

2) StarWind is not a memory pig. We just recommend to use some RAM as a write-back cache to speed up the things a bit (boost IOPS).

3) Not really... We do "spoofing" thru heavy caching just like f.e. NetApp does (but in a different way, they use NVRAM to store transactions log and we use multiple virtual controllers).

Yes, good link.

[rrnworks]

1) That's what I wondered - but would we risk getting support from starwind if we don't use a E5620? And would a E5620 suffice if we did enable dedupe?
2) great
3) So would a simple hardware RAID 1 on SATA drives suffice for this project?

[anton (staff)]

1) There should be no problems.

2)

3) RAID1 or RAID10 for 2-way replica and RAID0 or JBOD for 3-way replica

1) That's what I wondered - but would we risk getting support from starwind if we don't use a E5620? And would a E5620 suffice if we did enable dedupe?
2) great
3) So would a simple hardware RAID 1 on SATA drives suffice for this project?

[rrnworks]

Ok - so to summarize it appears to be fair to say that in general Native SAN for HV is 'not' very resource intensive ('except' only with CPU if using deduplication)?

[anton (staff)]

No it is not.

Ok - so to summarize it appears to be fair to say that in general Native SAN for HV is 'not' very resource intensive ('except' only with CPU if using deduplication)?