StarWind Software

Hello!
I am new to StarWind, i have never used it before.
I was reading tech papers about Starwind virtual san, that it can be used to build 2 node, or even 3 node iSCSI storage, which one is pretty cool.
Few things are not clear - for 2-node deployment, can i use 2 physical servers just for storage, and then, serve iSCSI or NFS to other servers which will have Linux KVM on it ?
Is there any reason why would Linux KVM not work with StarWind iSCSI or NFS ?

Regards,
Ron

Technically StarWind iSCSI and NFS *should* work with KVM. We don't have any deployment guides for KVM (have customers we know about using Xen but not much of KVM so far).

I'd recommend to take a "Compute and Storage Separated" guide for StarWind + iSCSI and use it as a reference with your KVM setup.

ron wrote:Hello!
I am new to StarWind, i have never used it before.
I was reading tech papers about Starwind virtual san, that it can be used to build 2 node, or even 3 node iSCSI storage, which one is pretty cool.
Few things are not clear - for 2-node deployment, can i use 2 physical servers just for storage, and then, serve iSCSI or NFS to other servers which will have Linux KVM on it ?
Is there any reason why would Linux KVM not work with StarWind iSCSI or NFS ?

Regards,
Ron

1) What is the average performance hit for 3-node setup, if the system itself is not a bottleneck (fast CPUs, fast networks, fast storage) ? For example, if i can get 10K R/W iops from single node, how much i would get from 3-node setup with the same hardware ?
2) How the all-ssd deployments are performing ?
3) Is there a guidelines for ssd storage ?

thanks!

1) What is the average performance hit for 3-node setup, if the system itself is not a bottleneck (fast CPUs, fast networks, fast storage) ? For example, if i can get 10K R/W iops from single node, how much i would get from 3-node setup with the same hardware ?

>>>I`d expect ~90% of hardware utilization on writes and more then 100% on reads since all nodes are active.

2) How the all-ssd deployments are performing ?

>>>Actually the steps are similar to the steps that usual deployment assues.

3) Is there a guidelines for ssd storage ?

>>>The performance of our solution is limited by the hardware of the server where it is running – mostly it is limited by the wire speed. As you may know Intel and Microsoft achieved 1000000 result in their result using StarWind as the SAN solution (to learn more about it you can use this link: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/news/32). So everything is basically needed (and this is not the easiest part), is properly configured system.
I will provide you with some recommendations and hints below if you don`t mind:
Recommended RAID for implementing an HA are RAID 1, 0 or 10. Due to low write performance, RAID 5 or 6 are can be used only with LSFS device, and it is highly not recommended to use them with basic image file based devices of StarWind.

Anatoly (staff) wrote:

I will provide you with some recommendations and hints below if you don`t mind:
Recommended RAID for implementing an HA are RAID 1, 0 or 10. Due to low write performance, RAID 5 or 6 are can be used only with LSFS device, and it is highly not recommended to use them with basic image file based devices of StarWind.

Thank you for your answer!
So, you are saying that it is not recommended to use thick provisioning with SSD , but instead use LSFS ?

Exactly! But please be aware that the current build of v8 has some issues with LSFS, so I`d recommend you to try out build that you can find by using he link below:
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... SFS#p22864