I was talking about Openfiler on Linux compared to Starwind on Windows, on exactly the same hardware each time, I don't know a lot about Linux vs. Windows storage and network stacks so I'll take your word for it. Would suggest to me that Openfiler was the problem then, because it was definitely a lo...

Thanks all, I've been away from this forum for a month or so and you've pretty much covered all the questions I had started to ask about HA/sync a while back (and some more I hadn't thought of) and didn't get very far with. Auto-failback is an important feature for us as we support a few client inst...

I did a load of comparative testing a while back between Openfiler and Starwind, using exactly the same hardware setup in both cases, but at the moment I can't remember where I saved the results :) The basic result was that in most situations Starwind was noticeably faster, particularly in IO intens...

As I remember it the official VMware advice is not to use any form of teaming or link aggregation but instead let the ESX software iSCSI handle the multipathing for you. Therefore you would set up each of the 4 NICs with a separate IP address on the same subnet, and then add each of those IPs to the...

I've had our test HA cluster running for over a month now, its been over 3 weeks since either of the nodes was restarted and everything is still looking fine so far which is good. One thing I have noticed though is that after a week or so the Starwind console can no longer display the logfile as its...

Yes, this confused me too - when writing the documentation for our first client install I put in a special note saying that if you get the "partner server is out of sync" message then you are attempting to sync the wrong way so cancel immediately.

Good, I just installed ESXi4 Update 1 on our test cluster and it doesn't seem to have fixed the storage connection alerting problem so that's still not an option unfortunately. In the meantime I'm investigating monitoring the Starwind service itself on each server but its not ideal. Btw, have you do...

Assuming you have another server or desktop on your network you might want to try adding another Starwind iSCSI target and then mounting that on a different Windows system using the MS iSCSI Initiator. Benchmark that with IOmeter or HDTune etc and see what the performance is like, if its much faster...

OK, I can understand that there may be scenarios where you would want to control the direction of sync but the lack of an alerting facility concerns me. What happens if one of the HA server pair reboots itself for some reason, or the Starwind service is restarted - one half of the pair will then be ...

I wanted to clarify a couple of things about how the HA works since I can't find much documentation: I've setup a pair of Win2k8 Starwind 5 servers with a single HA iSCSI target connected to a pair of ESXi4 servers, all seems to be working fine and performance is good. Although Starwind refers to on...

See comments in http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... t1914.html - I've done some more testing today.

I just tested it with ESXi4 and Starwind 5 HA, didnt need to change the config file - I was able to add the IP addresses of both NICs on both Starwind servers and ESXi4 showed a single datastore with 4 available paths as expected. Uncommenting that line does allow ESXi4 to discover all the available...

MS iSCSI will let you do MPIO without needing that config entry but I found ESXi3.5 dynamic discovery wouldnt discover the paths properly unless I added it, and the static discovery wont work with the software initiator. ESXi4 may well be different as they've improved the iSCSI implementation a lot,...

I've had a test setup running with 6 esxi hosts connected to 2 mirrored Starwind servers, both of which had 4 NICs and 6 targets each making 24 paths per host for the multipathing - and it was failing over properly. The only thing I've changed which I dont remember seeing in the ESX documentation is...

Not sure if I mentioned it before but I use the IOmeter settings suggested in this forum: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745 - it seems to be the only decent comparison of SAN performance that I have found, hence the 32Kb "Max Read". Not that it really matters, I think the transfer...