StarWind Software

Hi,

need some Help for planing with Starwind.
It will be a Storage for 4 VMware Hosts. We want to change from NetAPP to Starwind ...

Each of both Storage-Nodes will be the following design (specs):

- Dual Xeon E5-2650v2
- 128GB RAM
- 2 x LSI SAS HBA dualport
- 1 x Chelsio 10GB dualport SFP
- 1 x Intel 10GB dualport SFP
- OS: 2012R2

There will be 4 x 24 SAS JBOD Dataon 1640 directly connectet to both nodes. So each node will see all disks.
Two of the JBODS are (enclosure aware Mirror)
-16 x 900GB 10k SAS
- 8 x HGST(STEC) SSD

the other two JBODs are (enclosure aware Mirror)
- 24 x 900GB 10K SAS

For the 10GB Network there will be an 24 port 10GB Stack.

So the Disks are all directly attached to each node. Do i have to setup Sync between the Nodes, because of all two nodes see all disks?
Will it be active/active or Failover with Starwind?
Is there an Document for setting up witch two nodes and DAS?

thanks for helping out ...

Marian

You'll have to attach JBODs in a non-clustered mode (multiple SAS paths should go from a single server HBAs to one JBOD but not to others - this is CRITICAL).

That's done because StarWind a) does not use SAS to wire data between individual JBODs (that's implemented by faster multiple 10 GbE uplinks) and b) we don't use SAS built-in locking / reservation and rather implement own faster and more scalable distributed lock mechanism.

P.S. In general our recommendation would be to avoid DataOn completely. No other JBOD vendor (including much less known ones like SANS Digital) gave us so many issues DataOn did (baked SAS expanders, firmware bugs, erratic lock-ups with owner change within cluster, poor performance, compatibility against recent Samsung and Intel SSDs etc). If you'll compare it against Intel and SuperMicro you'll see these two companies have very similar (if not better) pricing, better build quality and testing sequence and (very important) much better hardware coverage. So making long story short: Intel and SuperMicro can ship new orders and replacement parts of full units faster.

Hi,

thanks for the answer ...
So what would you advise to build?

What Hardware do you use, for lets say about 96 HDD's HA Storage?

JBODs?

The client needs about 40TB of tiered (16xSSD & 80xSAS 10K) Storage for VMware. There are about 50 VM's running. 2 of them are SAP Maschines with a lot of IOPS.
Thanks for your recomendation.

cm3c

Normally we recommend using internally attached high capacity SATA spindles for storage, PCIe attached flash and RAM for IOPS (cache) and 10/40 GbE for a sync backbone.

If customer needs uber-high LUN density then going with JBODs is very possible. I'd go with Intel and put NL-SAS or SATA there. Having PCIe flash and RAM as a cache directly on hypervisor nodes.

StarWind does not do tiering on the same node (at least yet). It offloads "cold" data to inexpensive & slow node (SATA) keeping "hot" data on expensive & fast (flash and RAM).

cm3c wrote:Hi,

thanks for the answer ...
So what would you advise to build?

What Hardware do you use, for lets say about 96 HDD's HA Storage?

JBODs?

The client needs about 40TB of tiered (16xSSD & 80xSAS 10K) Storage for VMware. There are about 50 VM's running. 2 of them are SAP Maschines with a lot of IOPS.
Thanks for your recomendation.

cm3c