StarWind Virtual SAN Free and 2x Dell R620's

Software-based VM-centric and flash-friendly VM storage + free version

Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)

Post Reply
fxtoofaan
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2019 11:09 pm

Tue Mar 05, 2019 11:31 pm

Hello all, I am building a 2 node cluster for a client. I want to know whats the best way to set this all up.

Here is what I have now:
2x Dell PE R620 Dual 2.6GHz 8C E5-2650v2 192GB RAM
each server will get 2x 960GB Intel SSD drives
each server will also get 6x 1.8TB SAS drives
each server has 4port onboard 1gig nic card as well so I can use 2 posts for Virtual San and the other 2 ports for user connectivity.

I want to setup the 2x ssd with Raid1 and the 6x SAS with Raid6 and 1 hot spare

this will give me about 900GB SSD and about 9TB of SAS per server

we have about 2TB of exchange server data currently and about 1TB of file server data like user shares and so on
We use veeam to backup everything currently to a synology device

running vmware 5.5 with latest patches and also running vmware horizon view 5.3.6 for about 20 users.

So my question is, I want to setup the StarWind Virtual SAN Free, but should I set it up as a Log-Structured File System or FLAT. I would like to take advantage of inline compression+dedupe. Also since I have alot of available RAM in the 2 servers and also SSD can I setup both L1 and L2 caches as well as LSFS w/dedupe? Pros? Cons?

How will you set this up? Thank you,
fxtoofaan
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2019 11:09 pm

Thu Mar 07, 2019 3:50 pm

Anyone ?
Boris (staff)
Staff
Posts: 805
Joined: Fri Jul 28, 2017 8:18 am

Fri Mar 08, 2019 5:42 pm

Before running the LSFS devices I would recommend you checking the deduplication ratio with StarWind Deduplication Analyzer https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... n-analyzer
This tool will give a good idea whether it's worth running LSFS in your environment. But generally I would not recommend using caching with LSFS in case you go with it.
fxtoofaan
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2019 11:09 pm

Sat Mar 09, 2019 12:08 pm

Boris (staff) wrote:Before running the LSFS devices I would recommend you checking the deduplication ratio with StarWind Deduplication Analyzer https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... n-analyzer
This tool will give a good idea whether it's worth running LSFS in your environment. But generally I would not recommend using caching with LSFS in case you go with it.
Thank you for your reply Boris. Would you recommend then running flat file with L1/L2 caching instead? I can allocate ram for L1 and SSD for L2 caching.

Also does the Flat File takes care of the IO Blender issue in vmware or only LSFS fixes the IO Blender?
Michael (staff)
Staff
Posts: 317
Joined: Thu Jul 21, 2016 10:16 am

Wed May 01, 2019 8:49 am

Cache usage is completely dependent on your needs and production requirements. You can read about it here: https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... rinciples/
I would recommend starting from flat file without cache to simplify the configuration.
Post Reply