StarWind VSAN uncompatible with newest Broadcom and DELL PER

[FlashMe]

Hey Guys,

hope you all are donig well ? We found out that newest Broadcom and DELL PERC12 RAID Controller uses 4K for RAID Blocksize. Since you cant Change the Blocksize to 512-Byte, converged Setups with 2 StarWind Nodes and VMware ESXi or other Linux Distros is not possible anymore.Many customer uses this Style of Setup. You will get a warning Message that you cannot add 512 Byte Virtual Disk on 4k logical RAID. Will there be a fix for that?

Best regards.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Greetings,

Thanks for your email. I believe 4k disks have difficulties being connected to Linux in general (I don't think it will be available for datastore creation in ESXi). Here are several workarounds
1. Use firmware allowing to emulate 512 block.
2. If 1 is not possible, use a Windows-based VM and run StarWind VSAN inside it as described https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... phere-6-5/ (Windows Server Core or Hyper-V Core will do the job).

[FlashMe]

Hello Yaroslav,

If you run StarWind VSAN inside a VM PCie Passthrough dont Work too. Because you can only create 4K RAID one These RAID controllers. The Windows VM see it as 4k too. So after that you cannot create 512-Byte Virtual Disk inside Starwind Management Console on this RAID for Systems which need 512-Byte via iscsi.

That means in High Performance HCI Szenarios StarWind is uselesess too. Only VMDK are possible with These RAID controllers. That means the Performance will be bottlenecked too because then you have to use virtual SCSI Controller Like the nvme Controller.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Greetings,

Were you able to emulate 512 block size with the disks'/controller firmware?
Please log a call with StarWind Support (your reference is 1003743 so we could schedule a remote session to work on this issue together).

[Ivan (staff)]

Greetings,

We can confirm that 512 virtual disks cannot be created on a 4k sector-size physical disk (which is Perc12 VD in your case). We are working on implementing support for such scenario.

We will update the community once we have any updates.