New to Starwind and have questions

[webguyz]

Hi,

I have been reading up about Starwind Virtual San and wondering if I can just install it on 2 large servers that have 2012 R2 and 36 disks each. I want to set up dedicated HA SAN with ISCSI support for my VMware system that is running on blade hardware form Supermicro. I don't have any disks on the blades but from what I'm reading the hyperconverged Starwind software wants to run in a VM on VMware. I know way back before hyperconvergence became all the rage Starwind was able to be installed on 2 servers and HA set up between them with active/active failover.

Is this still possible? From what I'm reading it should still be doable but not 100% sure.

Is anyone out there using a 2 hardware node HA setup with VMware?

Thanks!

[Boris (staff)]

There are several ways to go:
1. Going hyperconverged. This would mean you need to setup a StarWind VM with Windows Server 2012R2/2016 installed in it and follow our guide for this type of setup - for vSphere 6.0 or vSphere 6.5.
2. Going compute and storage separated. Here you should have 2 standalone Windows boxes with Windows Server installed, which would handle StarWind VSAN on top of the storage they have. The storage is then presented to the ESXi hosts (any number of them), while the ESXi nodes do not need to have any significant amount of disks available locally, except for the OS bootable media. Check this technical paper.

[webguyz]

Thanks. Exactly what I was looking for.

[Boris (staff)]

You are welcome.