Physical Disk As Target

Software-based VM-centric and flash-friendly VM storage + free version

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Francesco
Posts: 25
Joined: Sun Jul 13, 2014 12:31 pm

Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:36 pm

I was thinking of using a physical disk as target instead of files and sharing it with 2 VMWare hosts. Advantage is that I can access the drive storage directly and volumes are managed by VMware instead of SW.

Is there anything else I should be aware of? Advantages/disadvantages? Recommendations?
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darklight
Posts: 185
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2015 2:04 pm

Fri Jun 26, 2015 10:17 am

I would recommend you to consider using native StarWind devices because of significant performance increase possibilities granted by L1 cache, L2 cache or LSFS or all of them at the same time. This combination is proven to be much more faster than the raw drive. You can run the IOMeter tests according to StarWinds recommendations here http://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware.c ... -of-tests/. After you will face the results you decision may change :)

BTW, yesterday a guy from StarWind performed a nice webinar showing the performance advantages of LSFS. I believe you can find it recorded here https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... ry?type=rw soon.
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bubu
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Jun 08, 2015 12:49 pm

Mon Jul 06, 2015 3:55 pm

StarWind ensures storage Fault Tolerance, single drive - not.
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Vladislav (Staff)
Staff
Posts: 180
Joined: Fri Feb 27, 2015 4:31 pm

Mon Jul 06, 2015 4:27 pm

I think, that FLAT drives are the best option since almost everyone uses them. They are well tested, stable and the community will be able to provide you with a solution should you run into issue.
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