Starwind HA vmware setup

[intraman]

Hi,

Wondered if someone can help me?

Here is my setup:

2 x HP DL360 G6 esxi 5.5 hosts with local 500GB SSD storage RAID 1 in each
2 x Starwind Win 2012 R2 nodes setup as a vm on each host
2 x 10GbE NICs
1 x win 2012 r2 test vm stored on Starwind shared thick disk (which is synced between the 2 x starwind vm nodes)

I've been testing free starwind v8 2 x node setup on esxi 5.5 for the last few days, got a couple of questions:

1. Is it best practise to enable VMware HA so my test vm can failover in a disaster? Or should this be a manual process?
2. Whats the best way to exclude the Starwind VM's from the VMware HA cluster?
3. The iscsi adapter on each node only has the IP address set for its own local starwind VM, is the correct way to setup starwind HA ?

I have managed to break the setup a few times thankfully it all in test not production so just wondering if I've got things setup correctly.

thanks in advance.

steve.

[Vladislav (Staff)]

Hello Steve,

Please find answers below:

• Since VMware has HA feature why not use it?
• Even StarWind VM shutdown excludes it from the VMware HA, therefore you can just remove the VM and it will be excluded from the cluster
• From the definition of Fault Tolerance the only connection is not an option. StarWind HA should be connected at least twice to ensure redundancy and its high availabilty

JFYI: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/techni ... Sphere.pdf

[intraman]

ok I'll have a read through the pdf to see if I've got it all hooked up correctly.

Getting some nice speeds on my labs though using DiskMark (networkdls):

84MB write
214MB read

This is in HA mode with 2 x 10GbE card connected to each other without a switch.

[Vladislav (Staff)]

So, are you satisfied with the result?

Did you have a chance to compare it with the underlying storage speed?

[intraman]

Yes so far satisfied, the underlying storage is much faster I'm afraid to say but that is when my test vm is migrated onto the local disk and not going through iscsi in HA mode.

[Oles (staff)]

Hello!

Please let me know if you have any questions left.