Hi All,
I'm just testing out StarWind VSAN free in our LAB with a view to possibly buying the commercial version for prod - It seems like a great product! We're currently testing on a pair of DL360 G8 servers each with 4x 4TB Seagate NAS in RAID10, and 2x Intel D3-4610 480GB in RAID1. These are standalone (non-HCI) and will serve datastores via ISCSI to both Hyper-V and ESXi 6.5+.
I'm just trying to get to grips with exactly how the disk sector size, RAID block size, windows allocation unit size, virtual disk size, etc should be set up for best performance when hosting datastores. I get that Hyper-v wants 4k and VMWare likes 512 but how should the great of the stack be configured. for example:
1. Seagate Exos X14 10TB says - "FastFormat models ship in 512e format state. When switching from 512e to 4Kn by executing the FastFormat routine, all data on the drive will be deleted. Note that data must be aligned to 4K sectors to see improved
performance in 4Kn format". So should I set them up as 512e (which according to this https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... lock-size/ may have performance issues or use them as 4Kn?
2. When I configure the RAID on the RAID controller (currently P420i but will be 9361-8i in prod) what should the stripe size be? Does it matter what the disks are as the array controller is another abstraction layer anyway?
3. I have read in various places that the stripe size can be left at 64K on the array controller as a safe bet. Is that a total stripe size (32k per pair in a 4 disk RAID10) or per disk pair.
4. Once the disk is initialised on Windows, what should the allocation unit be? Again does this just act as another abstraction layer?
5. Once the VSAN disk Image is created, I understand that ESX LUNs should be 512 and hyper-v (windows) LUNs should be 4k but doesn't that defeat the purpose of the optimisation down at the hardware level?
In summary, for best datastore performance on lightly loaded VMFS/CSV LUNs using mechanical disks (with flash cache), how should I configure the physical HDD, RAID10 stripe size, windows NTFS allocation unit size and then ultimately the VASN block size?
Sorry for the long first post and thanks in advance.
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