vsan disk pooling capability?

kktwenty · Fri Feb 25, 2022 11:20 am

Does starwind have an ability to create a pool of different sized disks and present a CSV based on the pool? I.e. the hardware presents three virtual disks - vdisk1 1Tb, vdisk2 2Tb and vdisk3 3Tb which starwind could "pool" the storage of 6Tb total. With this pool a CSV presented as 6Tb?

mahuan1688 · Sun Feb 27, 2022 3:33 am

StarWind SAN & NAS has pool ，but I don't know if the function is the same as you said
I know there are several software that have the functions you said, complex and simple

Mon Feb 28, 2022 6:25 am

Greetings,

Sadly no. The solution needs a logical device to be presented to an OS and it allows virtualizing storage within the capacity of the disk.

kktwenty · Mon Feb 28, 2022 2:22 pm

Thank you. I was hoping to reuse some of the larger capacity drives when I convert our SAN to a new storage model (I know I could simply create a second or third pool and present CSVs from those pools). Im weighing up S2D vs starwind for the nodes at the moment (the hardware will be the same, I suppose I could use a PERC card with starwind but would need to specify HBA without) this would definitely have sold it.

Mon Feb 28, 2022 7:01 pm

Just to make sure we are on the same page.
What you are trying to achieve is creating 3 virtual disks (i.e., RAID arrays) and combining them in CSV as a single iSCSI target?
If so, S2D will not support this scenario.

StarWind VSAN enables to creation 3 iSCSI targets and presents them separately over iSCSI.

mahuan1688 · Tue Mar 01, 2022 2:23 pm

The three iSCSI disks can be combined and the capacity can be released together through a pool. In the old starwind document, there is a software that can realize this. The software in Windows environment ，and also have Linux environment software，only know two product can do this，

Tue Mar 01, 2022 3:29 pm

They cannot be combined in a single LUN in StarWind VSAN. I am not sure about S2D either.

mahuan1688 · Wed Mar 02, 2022 12:25 pm

It's not vsan, it's a third-party product

Wed Mar 02, 2022 2:27 pm

Yes, you need 3rd party product to create such a target.

kktwenty · Thu Mar 03, 2022 3:48 pm

yaroslav (staff) wrote:Just to make sure we are on the same page.
What you are trying to achieve is creating 3 virtual disks (i.e., RAID arrays) and combining them in CSV as a single iSCSI target?
If so, S2D will not support this scenario.

StarWind VSAN enables to creation 3 iSCSI targets and presents them separately over iSCSI.

This I know but thank you for pointing it out. If I were to go S2D then I would be purchasing brand new hardware for two nodes. HBA only, no PERC, identical drives - basically certified drives and firmware on a pair of dells. Since this will only be a 2 node solution I would be looking at nested mirror with the appropriate capacity loss.

If I were to go starwind route I would be purchasing "as above" but with PERC, I would also be reusing the best of what I have left as a third node. I was seeing if I could combine drives together to maximise my storage pool. This gives me 3x failure points which would be acceptable with no loss of capacity.

I'm weighing up options and costs.

Mon Mar 07, 2022 7:58 am

Yes, if you store data on 3 separate disks without RAID, they are SPoF. What you can try is mirroring them with StarWind VSAN. This should grant a certain level of redundancy data.
Any sort of software RAID will result in capacity loss, i think, as drives are of different size here.