Migration from stand alone to 2 node
Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2015 3:22 am
Hello
I am hoping someone will be able to give me a clear path as the options seem to have changed with different versions of the software and how its marketed. Also first let me say I love what we have been using so far and appreciate the folks that let small companies get their feet wet with shared storage for free. We have been running off a single node of Starwinds for some of our shared storage for our test lab for the last couple years. Its run flawlessly. Because it has run so well we are looking into moving it within the next year into production, but we need to test as a HA platform before we risk our clients data. In our current lab we have upgraded to the newest build of 8 and are putting together a identical host to mirror to. So, based on this, these are my questions.
1. Is LSFS ready for prime time, looking in the forum and the internet it seems like its been in development for some time and has made large gains. Is it ready for a production environment. Our test servers will have around 20TB of RAID 10 storage, 128GB of RAM each and 640GB of SSD storage for L2 cache.
2. In what I have read it appears that if we move to LSFS we need to allow for 4.5GB of RAM per TB of defined storage, is this separate from whatever we might assign to L1 cache per TB?
3. It seems like it used to be the recommendation to enable L2 cache write back, but it seems like the current thinking is write thru, is this correct?
4. If we wanted to take our current lab server that is all setup and running using iSCSI, in what I believe you refer to a compute and storage model, do we need to wipe it or can we continue to use iSCSI? This seams a area I am confused. I have seem in older posts where the recommendation was to not use NFS on top of iSCSI for VMWare, and to not use VMWare's vSphere with NFS with Starwinds. But it seem like if I read the current version directions correctly the recommendation is to use the NFS and you cannot use iSCSI for the free version, is this correct? Do we have to stop using iSCSI? How will this impact us? The version of VMWare we are running is 4.1.
Thank you for your time.
Michael Collins
I am hoping someone will be able to give me a clear path as the options seem to have changed with different versions of the software and how its marketed. Also first let me say I love what we have been using so far and appreciate the folks that let small companies get their feet wet with shared storage for free. We have been running off a single node of Starwinds for some of our shared storage for our test lab for the last couple years. Its run flawlessly. Because it has run so well we are looking into moving it within the next year into production, but we need to test as a HA platform before we risk our clients data. In our current lab we have upgraded to the newest build of 8 and are putting together a identical host to mirror to. So, based on this, these are my questions.
1. Is LSFS ready for prime time, looking in the forum and the internet it seems like its been in development for some time and has made large gains. Is it ready for a production environment. Our test servers will have around 20TB of RAID 10 storage, 128GB of RAM each and 640GB of SSD storage for L2 cache.
2. In what I have read it appears that if we move to LSFS we need to allow for 4.5GB of RAM per TB of defined storage, is this separate from whatever we might assign to L1 cache per TB?
3. It seems like it used to be the recommendation to enable L2 cache write back, but it seems like the current thinking is write thru, is this correct?
4. If we wanted to take our current lab server that is all setup and running using iSCSI, in what I believe you refer to a compute and storage model, do we need to wipe it or can we continue to use iSCSI? This seams a area I am confused. I have seem in older posts where the recommendation was to not use NFS on top of iSCSI for VMWare, and to not use VMWare's vSphere with NFS with Starwinds. But it seem like if I read the current version directions correctly the recommendation is to use the NFS and you cannot use iSCSI for the free version, is this correct? Do we have to stop using iSCSI? How will this impact us? The version of VMWare we are running is 4.1.
Thank you for your time.
Michael Collins