The Latest Gartner® Magic Quadrant™Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software
Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)
I would like to know more about the curent capabilities Starwind offers in this area.anton (staff) wrote:Making long story short the idea behind the whole thing is pretty much the same: "el cheapo" backend storage (SATA) + uber-fast front storage (RAM).
Atlantis (it's not the first or second time we get a possible COI with these guys, they do a great job and I respect their technology a lot) keep everything in
RAM and just load-store the content on virtual device destroy-create sequence. We fire back transactions from RAM to SATA in a lazy writer thread. + they
are much more VDI centric with golden images and so on. We'll see how our in-line dedupe, LSFS and flash caching will play with VDI after V8 release. We're
considering the idea to basically provide a RAM disk (deduped of course) with an ability to load-store the content for VDI scenarios. I've contacted you in private
to discuss the whole thing so please check your PM and e-mail Thanks!
Woha great! Could you tell me some more about the features/options?anton (staff) wrote:Bad news: In the current production version of V8 you cannot do in-memory storage.
Good news: After we'll stabilize some features and roll out update for V8 (next few weeks) we'll seriously push in-memory storage scenario (data pinpointed to deduplicated cache, cache pre-heating etc) so very soon you'll be able to build VDI setups with Hyper-V nearly free of charge.
bacterialbag wrote:Woha great! Could you tell me some more about the features/options?anton (staff) wrote:Bad news: In the current production version of V8 you cannot do in-memory storage.
Good news: After we'll stabilize some features and roll out update for V8 (next few weeks) we'll seriously push in-memory storage scenario (data pinpointed to deduplicated cache, cache pre-heating etc) so very soon you'll be able to build VDI setups with Hyper-V nearly free of charge.
Did you model your solution after the atlantis solution?
I really hope I can get VM'S completely in-ram, with diferenting disks on my normal starwind storage. That would be uber-fast, AND economical!
Please keep me updated, I will buy your product the second you are adding support for in-ram VDI
anton (staff) wrote:Pretty much the same StarWind Virtual SAN V8 but with an ability to use RAM as a back-end storage
No it's not developed with Atlantis in mind it's 100% own design with all the components developed in-house.
You will pretty soon
bacterialbag wrote:Woha great! Could you tell me some more about the features/options?anton (staff) wrote:Bad news: In the current production version of V8 you cannot do in-memory storage.
Good news: After we'll stabilize some features and roll out update for V8 (next few weeks) we'll seriously push in-memory storage scenario (data pinpointed to deduplicated cache, cache pre-heating etc) so very soon you'll be able to build VDI setups with Hyper-V nearly free of charge.
Did you model your solution after the atlantis solution?
I really hope I can get VM'S completely in-ram, with diferenting disks on my normal starwind storage. That would be uber-fast, AND economical!
Please keep me updated, I will buy your product the second you are adding support for in-ram VDI
bacterialbag wrote:Will I be able to make Ram HA?
And serve x amount of pooled VM's without having to have the same amount of gold images taking up ram? so multiple vm's with one in-ram gold image, like atltis?
can i make the whole thing HA/auto restart?
if that would be possible i definately will be buying soon!!!
anton (staff) wrote:Yes, the same bunch of features as V8 has but with an ability to use RAM as a back-end storage.
No golden images used. With an in-line dedupe and 4KB dedupe block they are not needed.
Yes, you can auto-restart and whatever.
Are you targeting Hyper-V or VMware setup?
bacterialbag wrote:Will I be able to make Ram HA?
And serve x amount of pooled VM's without having to have the same amount of gold images taking up ram? so multiple vm's with one in-ram gold image, like atltis?
can i make the whole thing HA/auto restart?
if that would be possible i definately will be buying soon!!!
bacterialbag wrote:I am targeting Hyper-V
I want to be able to run a lot of VM's with in-ram performance, without needing to use loads of ram for the whole process.
Do you happen to know how Atlantis does this? I thought they just used a few deduped in-ram golden images that can serve up a big amount of VM's ?
Or is there a golden image for each VM, and is the dedupe making to ram-load acceptable?
Would you say your inline dedupe is as high quality as theirs? 8x more storage ?
Also, Can I use starwind dedupe on storage that is outside my HA licensed storage pool? like JBOD?
Last but not least: A 3 Node cluster 1TB license means I can take 1tb of storage from all 3 servers, and serve this as 1tb of HA storage right? How will this work with the ram? Will it be like this;
Use 200gb as ram as storage and only 800gb of other local storage make up 1 TB in total for the license. Or would it be able to use 1tb of local storage, and use ram as an "extra" ?
Could you give me some more info about features/tips regarding high performance (in-ram) VDI using SW?
anton (staff) wrote:Yes, the same bunch of features as V8 has but with an ability to use RAM as a back-end storage.
No golden images used. With an in-line dedupe and 4KB dedupe block they are not needed.
Yes, you can auto-restart and whatever.
Are you targeting Hyper-V or VMware setup?
bacterialbag wrote:Will I be able to make Ram HA?
And serve x amount of pooled VM's without having to have the same amount of gold images taking up ram? so multiple vm's with one in-ram gold image, like atltis?
can i make the whole thing HA/auto restart?
if that would be possible i definately will be buying soon!!!
bacterialbag wrote:So how is it going to be licensed? (this is a simple question even an engineer should know? )
Will i have to buy 3x 1TB license so i have all my servers licensed for 1tb, and then i can only offer 1tb of total HA storage?
Please help me on this topic...
By the way, I got about 400gb ram per node... will 100gb be enough for 100vm's (storage wise, the other 300 i'll use for the vm's actual ram, and management shizzle etc. )
anton (staff) wrote:We charge for licensed HA capacity. We don't care about number of replicas (2 or 3) and what you use as a back-end storage (RAM or flash or spindle). With the initial release In-Memory Storage is *NOT* going to be a Premium offering so basic price would include it.
With a typical deduplication ratio of 1:10 your 100GB would be equivalent of a 1TB of storage. So if your raw VMs do fit into 1TB you'll be fine.
bacterialbag wrote:So how is it going to be licensed? (this is a simple question even an engineer should know? )
Will i have to buy 3x 1TB license so i have all my servers licensed for 1tb, and then i can only offer 1tb of total HA storage?
Please help me on this topic...
By the way, I got about 400gb ram per node... will 100gb be enough for 100vm's (storage wise, the other 300 i'll use for the vm's actual ram, and management shizzle etc. )
bacterialbag wrote:The 1tb license HA is BEFORE dedupe right?
I do not quite understand you here,anton (staff) wrote:We license served capacity. So dedupe would decrease space on the underlying disk and you'll still pay for 1TB.
bacterialbag wrote:The 1tb license HA is BEFORE dedupe right?