StarWind Software

Hi guys long time admirer of starwinds and i am going to be installing it in my home lab in the next few weeks work permitting of course.

My setup is a 2 node esxi5.5 cluster, that have 2 dual port nics and 1 nic onboard for a total of 5 on each host.

I have a few initial questions.

1) I see from the guide pdf's that nics are required specifically for starwind, with the 5 i have would this leave me enough for nics for the usual vsphere activities e.g vm, management, vmotion.
2) Secondly is a physical switch required for the configuration?

Many thanks

Hello,

Basically we recommend to use at least 4 NICs, you have 5, therefore you are fit our best practices.

the fastest NIC for StarWind SYNC,
the second fastest NIC for iSCSI,
others for vsphere activities
Heartbeat may be assigned to any NIC

Please note that SYNC and iSCSI connections are the most essential for performance. If you have 6 Gbit/s on your HDDs you should use 10 Gb NIC for SYNC and 10 Gb for iSCSI, otherwise your performance will be limited by these NICs.

Thanks.

Unfortunately my NICs are only 1GB.

How much of an impact will this have on performance?

Let's calculate:

If block being transferred has size of 4kB, then 1Gb/8bit/4kB = 31250 maximum possible IOps;
If 64kB, then 1952 IOps.

you decide if this is OK