StarWind VSAN Setup Options

[OrcidSamuel]

Hi, I am evaluating the options of Starwind vSAN, and from what I can see, the main one is it's disk ROI, correct? It is basically a software layer that installs on top of VMware ESXi and replicates the data from local datastores to other VM hosts. So you are always going to be using max disk usage on all node all the time even though the VMs may only be ever running on one VM host.

If you use a 2 node setup, you are setting up a RAID 1 mirror of the local storage with another VM host, right?

How is this any different than just setting up a cronjob that is constantly rsyncing every hour the data from a local datastore to a standby NFS server and rsyncing that data to another VM host that is just sitting there in standby mode?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Welcome to StarWind Forum.

a software layer that installs on top of VMware ESXi

The solution is available not only for VMware ESXi but also for Windows. It can be a shared storage provider for Xen Server in a compute and storage separated scenario too.

you are setting up a RAID 1 mirror of the local storage with another VM host, right?

Yes, StarWind VSAN VMs resemble a mirror.

How is this any different than just setting up a cronjob

Long story short, StarWind VSAN provides active-active replica, which unlike a cron job enables VMs to start seamlessly (i.e., without any downtime) using the storage of the partner in case of one server's storage malfunction. Cron job provides some sort of active-passive replication.