StarWind Software

Hello.
We didn't have the budget to buy SW Appliance, so our only option is to build it by our self hyper-converged appliance.
We have 2 x R510 (2 x X5670, H700 512MB, 64GB RAM, RAW Storage on r10 (HGST 3TB drives), Smart-UPS 1500VA USB & Serial RM 2U 230V) with 5 yearsextended warranty from our local shop.

We would like to buy SW VSAN software with 4TB cluster limitation.
Rest of non clustered storage (because of 4TB limitation) we will use to store cold data, VM's not business critical, VM backups ...
On a clustered part we will keep 5VM (file server, mail server, 3 app servers).

What should we know/buy to keep it working well as a cluster?
NIC with RDAC (Mellanox or Intel) for each node
NIC - Intel 4x1GB for LAN access (2 teamed ports).
Caching - how to chose the best way to cache those data? THNSNJ480PCS3 from Toshiba, or just add more RAM? It's not so IO demanding to write now but when we will virtualize our Oracle we will have to deal with that somehow.

Any suggestion related to it?
Should we buy Windows 2016 or wait for 2019?
Best regards. Pawel

Pawel,

Your account manager has sent you an email regarding this, please respond to it.

Hello Boris.
Yes, I get you offer and we will probably decide to use VSAN but appliance is out of our budget.

My questions are more hardware related.

Btw. this 4TB limitation is for raw storage, or if I configure R10 with 4 x 2TB drives it will be ok?
Btw. 2. can I use some mirrored not enterprise SSD to create even read cache?
Best regards. Pawel

You could have put hardware related questions to the account manager as well. As long as you put hem here, let me try to answer them.

NIC with RDAC (Mellanox or Intel) for each node
NIC - Intel 4x1GB for LAN access (2 teamed ports).
Caching - how to chose the best way to cache those data? THNSNJ480PCS3 from Toshiba, or just add more RAM? It's not so IO demanding to write now but when we will virtualize our Oracle we will have to deal with that somehow.

I would suggest using two Mellanox NIC, out of which one will be dedicated to iSCSI, another to Synchronization.
Intel NICs teamed together are fine for the management link.
You can use either RAM or SSD cache based on your working set. Just keep in mind that SSD cache does not offer write-back mode, thus improving only read operations, while RAM cache can be either write-back for improving reads and writes, or write-through for improving reads only. You would need to decide on this based on your information or some monitoring results.

Should we buy Windows 2016 or wait for 2019?

Windows Server 2016 is just fine now. From what I have seen, there are lots of folks around that are still using Windows Server 2012R2 in the year of 2018, and it works just great. So does 2016, too. No need to wait for 2019 to hit GA.

Btw. this 4TB limitation is for raw storage, or if I configure R10 with 4 x 2TB drives it will be ok?
Btw. 2. can I use some mirrored not enterprise SSD to create even read cache?

4TB limitation is for StarWind devices size, not for raw storage. You can have 4 TB of HA storage and unlimited amount of standalone devices.
You can use mirrored SSDs to create read cache.