darklight wrote:Yup, it is.

No performance drawbacks here and more reliable to me since you can treat these starwind virtual disk files like normal files.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing!!

L2 cache in Starwind is defined on a per-LUN basis. It's my understanding that they're researching the ability to have an L2 cache that all devices can share.. Not a deal breaker for most people, but I don't have a lot of space on my SSDs to carve out for L2 cache for individual devices. I'm waitin...

Samsung 840s here.. No problems whatsoever. I use LSI's Cachecade, so I have no input regarding Starwind's L2 cache. Best of luck! My experience with LSI's Cachecade is that it is strictly write-through (read-only cache, as opposed to read/write). I appreciate your response, but I am really seeking...

So just for clarification, StarWind VirtualSAN always sits on top of an existing NTFS volume? Even when using LSFS? Being new to the product, I assumed that you work with raw blocks like DataCore. And given that LSFS is called "filesystem", I assumed it woukd be sitting on raw blocks as it...

So it is less risky to do L2 cache in write-back mode if your SSDs are mirrored in a RAID1. Correct?

I am ~10 days into a trial of vSAN standard and unfortunately haven't got it configured yet. I called my sales rep yesterday to try to bounce a few technical questions off of him and help get me moving in the right direction, but only got his VM & haven't connected with him yet. So here are my q...

If you are only using the SSD as a Tier 2 cache, is there actually a benefit to having RAID? I realize that RAID will help reliability and RAID10 is generally regarded to help performance. But in the event that you don't have the SSDs in RAID and are using them as a Tier 2 cache, what is the worst-c...

Anton, Thanks for the clarification. Now I'm really curious on the bandwidth we get out of a Dell PERC H800 connected to external JBOD trays (i.e. at what point would we max out a single card's bandwidth [or a single PCI Express bus])? Based on a quick check, the H800 uses PCIe 2.0 x8. PCIe 2.0 (per...

I take that as a "no".

Anton,

Do you feel that DAS is as flexible and scalable as iSCSI?

Awesome info. Thanks for clarifying!!

Regards,
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Doug

Hi all, I'm new to StarWind and we have project we're looking to do with it. Am I correct in understanding that Virtual SAN actually is supposed to be installed directly on the Hyper-V parent/host, rather than on a child/guest Windows VM hosted on the parent/host? I just wanted to make sure I unders...

Thanks for the clarification on this. I ask, because back in February one of your sales guys told me that we had to use direct attached storage. He tried to point me toward the Dell PE R720/R730. We are a Dell shop and didn't mind the recommendation. But it would be nice to use iSCSI sometimes due t...

Anton thanks for the response. Just to be clear, are you saying that using Microsoft's iSCSI initiator for this purpose is indeed supported? Or are you saying that the only way that we can/should use a QNAP, Synology, FreeNAS, etc. is if we have StarWind v.San's Windows OS access the QNAP/Synology/F...

I'm not seeing many references to people using devices like QNAP, Synology or others as the block devices for StarWind Virtual SAN. Can StarWind Virtual SAN use any iSCSI targets as storage/block devices that can be added to its storage pools? I saw one thread in these forums that made reference to ...