StarWind V5.9/6.0 Beta

[Bohdan (staff)]

StarWind Software presents the new version of its main storage solution – StarWind iSCSi SAN 5.9 (beta version) – now enhanced by three-nodes High Availability (HA) architecture. Today we are happy to provide our customers with assured Business Continuity and Powerful Data Protection.

New Features and Improvements

High availability:
- Three active nodes for more availability. Common interconnection diagram is attached.

Deduplication:
- Replication to remote iSCSI Tartet over WAN as an experimental feature (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/tmplink ... cation.pdf).
- Data deletion support. Unused data blocks are overwritten by new actual data.
- 30% less memory usage (2MBs per 1GB of deduplicatied storage on 4kb deduplication block).

StarWind SMI-S agent: This is now available as a separate download.
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... t2739.html

UPDATE:

New Features and Improvements
High Availability:
- Management functions for HA device nodes. You can add new node to HA device, remove or switch existing nodes without recreating the whole HA device.
- High availbility device can use other types of StarWind devices for storing data. It can be deduplicated device, thin-provisioned IBV device, or DiskBridge device.

Deduplicated disk:
- Asynchronous replication of deduplicated storage. Any iSCSI target can be used as a destination storage for replication.

iSCSI Diskless boot:
http://starwindsoftware.com/tmplink/Sta ... SIBoot.pdf

Backup:
- Backup and management for VMWare ESX virtual machines.
- Some additional features in Backup and management for Hyper-V virtual machines.
- New GUI (integrated to StarWind management console) to manage backup process.
- Simplified process of connection to ESX and Hyper-V servers.

StarWind 6.0 beta is ready for download from the following link:
http://starwindsoftware.com/tmplink/StarWindBeta.exe

Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions.
Thank you for cooperation

[Martin Fluck]

Hi Bohdan,

Been a while since I've had time to contribute to the beta program, hopefully I'll be able to give 5.9 a decent looking with XenServer 6 and PVS 6.

Is 5.9 available as a XenServer virtual applicance?

Thanks,

Martin

[lohelle]

Thank you for adding ALUA support! It works!!

(edit: I see that the last image came first. The bottom picture is when both nodes are up)

Created a HA-device with two nodes, 192.168.252.202 and 192.168.252.17. The .17 one selected as non optimized path (ALUA).

When selecting round robin mode, only the paths to the .202-node is used! When shutting down SW on .202 both paths on .17 are used. Goes back to .202 again when starting SW on .202 again (after sync is done).

[lohelle]

Small error in the GUI.

btw: is it possible to add a remote (other subnets) node now? In the wizard I needed to have corresponding subnets on all nodes.

How do I setup async replication?
And how to create HA dedupe device?

[anton (staff)]

We don't provide virtual appliances at this moment. We've dropped Linux as a core OS and working on do-it-yourself-a-virtual-appliance package. So you could build VSA with the the most recent StarWind (and not stripped down version we use for Linux-based VSA) and any Windows OS you have (including 100% free Hyper-V).

Hi Bohdan,

Been a while since I've had time to contribute to the beta program, hopefully I'll be able to give 5.9 a decent looking with XenServer 6 and PVS 6.

Is 5.9 available as a XenServer virtual applicance?

Thanks,

Martin

[lohelle]

"- Data deletion support. Unused data blocks are overwritten by new actual data. "

How do this work? And when?
I created a 10 GB dedupe-device and connected it to one of my ESXi 5.0 hosts.

Added a 8 GB disk to a VM, put 2 GB of random files on it, deleted the data, sdeleted, copied 2 GB new data.

The dedupe disk size grew all the time, except when running sdelete where the metadata-file was the only one that grew much.

[anton (staff)]

You don't really want to know how it works

When? When you overwrite the same LBA with a new content and old content is not used by anybody else.

Do you run current V5.9 beta? I need to check do we have delete-enabled built in it and actual delete enabled by default.

"- Data deletion support. Unused data blocks are overwritten by new actual data. "

How do this work? And when?
I created a 10 GB dedupe-device and connected it to one of my ESXi 5.0 hosts.

Added a 8 GB disk to a VM, put 2 GB of random files on it, deleted the data, sdeleted, copied 2 GB new data.

The dedupe disk size grew all the time, except when running sdelete where the metadata-file was the only one that grew much.

[lohelle]

You don't really want to know how it works

When? When you overwrite the same LBA with a new content and old content is not used by anybody else.

Do you run current V5.9 beta? I need to check do we have delete-enabled built in it and actual delete enabled by default.

Well actually, I want to know. If the paths are managed by VMware after it identifies the target as an ALUA array, the "AULA-stability" should not be a problem at all, as Starwind does not have to "do something special" (not more than normal).

Please check if it is enabled by default, and if not how to enable it.

[anton (staff)]

No, there's no relation to ALUA at all.

No, it's not zero page write or deallocation in some way so ESX should know nothing about it.

Sure, we'll check this after a weekend.

You don't really want to know how it works

When? When you overwrite the same LBA with a new content and old content is not used by anybody else.

Do you run current V5.9 beta? I need to check do we have delete-enabled built in it and actual delete enabled by default.

Well actually, I want to know. If the paths are managed by VMware after it identifies the target as an ALUA array, the "AULA-stability" should not be a problem at all, as Starwind does not have to "do something special" (not more than normal).

Please check if it is enabled by default, and if not how to enable it.

[Bohdan (staff)]

Small error in the GUI.

btw: is it possible to add a remote (other subnets) node now? In the wizard I needed to have corresponding subnets on all nodes.

How do I setup async replication?
And how to create HA dedupe device?

Thanks! It will be fixed soon.
We don't know whether it is good idea... Corresponding subnets are simpler and reasonable.

To setup replication follow the steps in the guide:
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/tmplink ... cation.pdf
Deduplication support for HA devices will be in the next release.

[Bohdan (staff)]

Hi Bohdan,

Been a while since I've had time to contribute to the beta program, hopefully I'll be able to give 5.9 a decent looking with XenServer 6 and PVS 6.

Is 5.9 available as a XenServer virtual applicance?

Thanks,

Martin

Hi Martin!
Nice to see you again in StarWind Beta program
Anton has already answered your question.
Let us know about the the test results.

[lohelle]

btw: Is there a particular feature you want us to test more than the other?
I have some spare time now and then, and I will use some of it on Starwind.

Hey, I would be interested in testing the VMware backup plugin as soon as possible too!

[Alex (staff)]

Some clarification on data deletion support in deduplication plugin:
Deduplication virtual device stores in its files user data and some additional information for journaling.
We have the situation:
1. New device has been created. The device has been filled with data.
2. Data has been deleted.
3. Client writes fresh data to the device.

On step 3 deduplicated device will reuse disk space that has been allocated on the step 1.
But size of deduplicated device files still grows, because journaling data has to be stored.
Of course, on step 3 it must grow much more slowly then on step 1.

Disk space will not be reused when a client overwrites existing data blocks in two cases: 1) device has settings for replication 2) device has snapshots (snapshotted data is locked in data files).

[Bohdan (staff)]

Guys,
what do you think about interfaces configuration dialog in 5.9? Here it is necessary to specify sync and HB channels for 3 Nodes, so the dialog contains significant amount of interface information.
Is the dialog simple enough and clear? Compared to 5.8 one.
Do you have any ideas how to make it better?

[Bohdan (staff)]

btw: Is there a particular feature you want us to test more than the other?
I have some spare time now and then, and I will use some of it on Starwind.
Hey, I would be interested in testing the VMware backup plugin as soon as possible too!

It is HA for 3 nodes. And remote replication for deduplicated disk devices, if you have slow channels.