VSAN GUI support for cache drives

[evan.witek@avid.com]

Hello,
I have 2x two node paid clusters and would like to set up SSD caching drives in each node. It doesn’t seem this is available in the GUI, is there a plan for that to be available?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Caching is set when the device is created.
We see people using less and less SSD caching that's why it is not in GUI for ow.
As a side note, you can use that SSD for a HA device rather than boosting reads alone.
Good luck with your project!

[evan.witek@avid.com]

That's interesting, so is there any caching capability for reads and more specifically, writes? How would I get better write performance with caching using SW Raid and HDDs?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Yes, you can enable a write-back cache (https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... rinciples/) or set up third-party solutions (e.g., install OpenCAS). Write-back cache will increase risks of data loss during outages/simultaneous service crashes, will make full synchronization more frequent, and will lead to simultaneous not synchronized state in case of stopping StarWindService simultaneously on both nodes.
If you set up anything like OpenCAS though, this cluster should not be used in production.