Hello from the field: StarWind VSAN Performance

[FlashMe]

Hello Guys,

pretty new to the StarWind forum but not for the awesome VSAN Software. We are a StarWind Partner in Germany and a new customer project will start tomorrow. If you are interested in real life performance benchmarks this thread is for you

Our customer will replace his aging 4 node Dell vSphere Cluster and Dell Equallogic storages with StarWind VSAN (All Flash). Dell Equallogic Storages are HDD based so random IOPS are very poor. Design was created and verified with the incredible pre sales engineering Team. Thanks Guys. It makes so much fun to Work with you.

After checking the customer needs and wishes we were ready to build an rocking StarWind Infrastructure. Because of the Budget we choose an Mixed Hyperconverged/Converged solution. 2 Server will build the Computing and Storage Stack while the two other ESXi will Connect via ISCSI to them. The new solution consists of:

4 x Dell PowerEdge R750 Server
2 x of them with 10x 3,84 TB vSAS SSD each with:
Dell H755 Raid Controller
768 GB RAM
Dual Intel Xeon Gold CPU
2x Mellanox Connect-x5 25 GbE SFP28 Adapter (ISCSI and SYNC)
1x Quad Port 25 GbE Adapter
Dell BOSS Card

2x Dell Power Switches from S Series (25 GbE)
2x Dell R650 Veeam Backup Servers with Local Storage + Tape Libary + Offsite Cloud Backup

As i wrote i will fill this thread with real Life Performance stats from this design as it can be useful for other Guys here

I look Forward to the Implementation and bilding phase

best regards

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

Will be waiting for your feedback. Please feel free to contact us at support@starwind.com if assistance is needed.

[FlashMe]

Thank you

Tests are currently being carried out. I will update this Thread in the upcoming days.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Thanks

[FlashMe]

So first small Tests looks pretty good. I will publish results and latency summary tomorrow.

Starting Point:
--------------------------
4K Random Read IOPS on Local RAID Controller: 384.000 IOPS per Node, 1500 MB/s (Dell H755 inside of StarWind Virtual Appliance which ist mounted via Pcie Passthrough on /mnt/raid5)

After Creation of 1 StarWind HA Datastore
--------------------------
4K Random Read IOPS on 1 VM on 1 StarWind HA Datastore: 190.000 IOPS (tested with DiskSpd, Paravirtual NVME Controller and 25G Disk)

[yaroslav (staff)]

Greetings,

Thanks for your feedback!
Please note this to be an I/O for a single VM. A single VM cannot saturate the datastore performance with its VMDK. You could do a cumulative test with 4-5 VMs running on a datastore and adding up their performance.
Another workaround that could help improve performance over iSCSI could be creating more VMKernels on the iSCSI vSwitch and connecting them as separate VM network adapters to StarWind VM.