Hi folks,
I've just read the PERFORMANCE HIGH SCORE news you guys released, it's amazing, congratulations!
I don't know if here on StarWind's forum is the best place to ask it, but there is a point on this benchmark that has raised a doubt: Is it mentioned that ReFS for the CSV has achieved a better perfomance than NTFS ?
"ReFS showed convenient performance overtopping the results that we had using NTFS."
I was surprised to read this, because as far as I know, when using ReFS for CSV all IO requests from other nodes have to pass through the owner node via SMB. It's called "Redirected Access".
https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-8/nt ... erver-2016
Using NTFS instead, you have "Direct Access" for all nodes directly by iSCSI, just metadata syncronizations are done through SMB on the onwer node. That is why Microsoft recomends one CSV per node, to avoid constants indirect access for metadata operations.
I couldn't find any updates about it on Windows Server 2019 documentations, but I tested it on WS2016 and confirmed: Just the owner node access the shared volume through iSCSI when using ReFS. All other nodes access it through SMB on the same LAN assigned for cluster communications.
I think that using ReFS, in the case of one VM migrate to another node (a failover for example) would impose a heavy IO penality, and worse, it could mess with your QoS setup that are optimized for iSCSI traffic.
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