StarWind vSAN not retaining modifications to StarWind.cfg

[paladin245]

Hi Gents & Ladies,

For a long time now, when having issues with or needing to change things in StarWind VSAN, I've been able to modify the StarWind.cfg and .swdisk files for each of my mirrored devices. This can be especially important if trying to fix mistakes with target > Device mapping. When upgrading from starwind-v8.0.13861 to starwind-v8.0.14033, this functionality now no longer works and StarWind.cfg is overwritten on service restart. Is this expected behaviour?

I've been trying to create a replacement HAImage from an existing disk image file, and as part of this I accidentally created additional targets that weren't needed. Normally I would clean this up in the StarWind.cfg and move on, but this time my adjustments to the configuration are just being erased. So I used the appropriate powershell scripts to remove the additional targets, and the "imagefile4" objects that were wrong (as imagefile3 exists and is the one I need to work). Somehow removing imagefile4 has actually removed imagefile3! but the underlying objects on the the physical disk structure are all still there.

Am I going to have to downgrade back to 13861 to get this functionality back, or is there a new method to the madness?

Cheers!

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

Are you using StarWind VSAN for vSphere? Please contact us at support@starwind.com

[paladin245]

Hi yaroslav,

Sorry I should have been clear, I'm using StarWindX for management because I'm using the Community / Free version running on a Windows Server 2016 VM's on a pair of VMware ESXI 6.5 hosts. Hence I work mostly out of the .swdisk or starwind.cfg for many changes or adjustments. My structure is like this:

Two Hosts - VS1, VS2 (ESXI 6.5)
10G SFP+ interconnects for LAN, iSCSI and SW-SYNC running through a pair of DELL X4012 switches
Two StarWind VM's - SW1, SW2 (Windows Server 2016, running stand alone / not domain joined)
In ESXI I have enabled PCI-E passthrough and assigned the DELL PERC H710 RAID controller (8x 10TB's in RAID6) and a pair of Intel DC P3605 1.6TB SSD's to the StarWind VM on each host

The storage is laid out as:
SW-NVMe1 (Target)
--- HAImage1 (img1 File, 1st Intel P3605)
SW-NVMe2 (Target)
--- HAImage2 (img2 File, 2nd Intel P3605)
SW-HDD1 (Target)
--- HAImage3 (img3 File, PERC H710, 16GB Write-Through L1 cache)

The reason I needed to make changes was that I had experienced a disk failure and decided to rebuild my existing RAID volumes on the PERC H710's from RAID5 to RAID6 to offer more resiliency. So I needed to:
1). Erase HAImage3 device on the SW1 node, rebuild the RAID array on the PERC and create a new 'img3' disk device
2). Mount this new device in VMware and migrate all existing VM's to the new RAID6 backed volume, then blow away HAImage3 on SW2 node
3). Create new HAImage3 device based on the new 'img3' device on SW1 that contains all my VM data using the CreateHA2 script (setting create to false for targets on both SW1 and SW2 and false for create image file on SW1)

I did end up resolving my issue after spending a number of hours testing today. Initially I tried downgrading to an older version but that didn't resolve it, so I upgraded back to v8.0.14033. Every time I'd restart the StarWind vSAN service or the entire VM it would reset the contents of both the .swdisk and starwind.cfg files, I ended up setting read-only flag on the files after making my edits then restarting the services. This successfully held my changes, so I removed the read-only flag and restarted the services again and this time the config file updated normally without losing my manual edits.

While I've never experienced this behaviour before I've at least been able to resolve my issues and HAImage3 is synchronising now and all my VM data is OK.

Cheers!

[yaroslav (staff)]

Greetings,

Thanks for letting me know that everything works fine!
StarWind VSAN 14033, according to my tests, works just fine with PCI devices. The thing is that PCI pass-through has its own odds in use.
Whenever you need to recreate the HA, please use AddHAPartner from E:\Program Files\StarWind Software\StarWind\StarWindX\Samples\powershell. If you need to create a new HA device (on both sides) do CreateHA_2.

Let us know here if any assistance is required in the future.