Help getting started with vSAN

[wnccloud]

Hello! I'm getting ready to setup a 2-node Hyper-V Cluster using StarWind vSAN and looking for some guidance. My goal is to have a high-performance HA cluster for hosting VMs. However, this is my first attempt at any type of clustering.

I have two of the following spec'd servers available for this project:
Dell R640 with 2x Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs, 384 GB RAM, 8x 3.84TB NVMe drives, 2x 1GbE ports (Broadcom 5720), 2x 10GbE ports (Broadcom 57416), and 2x 25GbE SFP28 ports (Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx)

Storage: Will need to provide at least 10TB of storage for Hyper-V VMs using a mirrored Storage Spaces disk.

Networking: My plan was the following (please advise if not optimal):
OS Management on 1GbE port
Switch Embedded Team vSwitch using the 10GbE ports for Hyper-V VMs
StarWind vSAN Synchronization using one (or both?) of 25GbE ports (directly attached).

What is the best way to configure the networking for my setup?
For the Sync and iSCSI/Heatbeat channels - how do I configure those network IPs?

And last, what is NVMe-oF and is it anything I should be concerned with?

Thanks in advance for any help or advice!

[yaroslav (staff)]

Greetings

See this guide for hyperconverged (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... rver-2016/) and converged (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... rver-2016/) setups.

I'd rather use a hardware RAID to eliminate the performance limitations of the software RAIDs.

The heartbeat channel in StarWind VSAN just confirms the health of the partner by sending pings and internal, service-only commands. It does not interfere with iSCSI traffic. Given that, you are free to use iSCSI link for heartbeat.

And last, what is NVMe-oF and is it anything I should be concerned with?

See this article (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... -initiator). It is an experimental feature. Feel free to disable the service, especially if you are running non-PCIe-SSDs as good old iSCSI is enough for HDDs and SSDs.