StarWind Software

Hello all
I am build a San and three server ESXI vSphere Cluster
Picking out and verifying compatibility if the hardware has been a pain but i think i got a good setup.
The San will be an HA 2 node cluster,
The chassis is the CSE-846E26-R1200B this is a supermicro case with redundant power supply, 24 x 3.5" SAS Hot-swap Drive Bays
and a dual Chip LSI SAS expander that will allow redundant links to 1 or 2 SAS controllers
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chas ... -R1200.cfm

The motherboard is the S8225WAGM4NRF this is dual socket C32 Opteron Board, it has an onboard LSI Dual port SAS Controller that will hook to the dual port SAS expander. It also has lot of other nice stuff like built in iKVM
I choose this board over a C34 board because all the c34 chips are 8 or 12 core and I am using this same board in my 3 ESXI boxes -the SAS controller. vmware vsphere 4 essentials plus sets a max of 2 cup 12 cores per box and with the c32 I can max out without going over and do so with fast cheap CPUS.
http://www.tyan.com/(A(rTrXyvhxm84VaHS2wOEdqD_pWn9FKw_9vDmMXL65SAMT7hhcWpg3rcgot0mhBffynyPOt-eNRi5aMZvGHjT1EEKUgcq3zEktKUDC-zk10do1))/product_SKU_spec.aspx?ProductType=MB&pid=687&SKU=600000213
The CPU is the AMD Opteron Six-Core Model 4184 2.80 GHz
There will be 2 of these in each server.

The RAM is KVR1333D3D4R9S/4G Kingston Technology 4GB 1333MHZ DDR3 ECC Reg with Parity CL9 TS
Each server with have 8 sticks for a total of 32GB of RAM.

The network card is Intel I340 E1G44HTBLK 1Gbps Quad Port Sever Network Adapter
Each Server will have 2 of these. 4 ports, two from each card will make a 4Gbps sink link and 4 ports two from each card will connect to the san switches to make a 4 Gbps San Link. These boards also have 4 onboard Intel NICs and 2 of those will make a 2Gbps link to the network Switches for NAS and RDP.

Ok now for the questions, the San Servers will have 3 tiers of storage, 1st an SSD array Using Crucial RealSSD 256 GB. This will be for my databases and the like. The 2nd is a SAS 600Gb Cheetah 15k Array this is where the VMFS will be stored (the virtual machines system drives) 3rd is made of Western Digital RE4 2TB Drives this will be for holding backups and snapshots .

I am Not a Fan of RAID 5 , So if the SAN is a HA set and they are mirroring each other, do the arrays in each box really need more redundancy? If I slept fine when my data was in a raid1 before, should I still sleep fine if it is on two raid 0 being mirrored by starwind effectively making a RAID 0+1 would the data be just as safe? If it is I sure would save a lot of money and drive space in my SAN. Chassis

Right Now the plan is to setup both boxes like this with three arrays, the Tier 1 storage 7 drive RAID1E + 1 Hot Spare(896 GB SSD), the Tier 2 storage 7 Drive Raid1E + 1 Hot Spare(2100 Gb SAS) and Tier 3 storage as a 2 Drive Raid 0
The Tier 3 array will be depending on starwind for its redundancy, but it will just be holding backups so by its nature the data it will hold is redundant as the same data on the other arrays too.

But would you run other arrays in this fashion? I have also though about setting it up so that Array 1 is a Raid 0 in SANServer 1 and a Raid 1e or Raid 10 in San Server 2. And the same for array 2 but have Sanserver 1 hold the raid 1e or 10 and have SANServer 2 hold the Raid 0. This would give you 3 copies of each array; two of them are auto healing, thanks to the hot spare on the raid 1E or 10. And it would free up 8 drive slots on each of my chasses and save a lot of cash, what do you think about this?

1) Initially setup looks absolutely admirable.

2) There's not much use from SSD with StarWind at this moment unless you really know what you're doing... Better use cheap SATA in RAID 1/10 and tons of RAM we're going to convert into distributed write-back cache.

3) RAID 5 and 6 suck... Use cheap SATA with killer value per terabyte, RAID 1/10 and tons of RAM. For the same money! Pretty much like 2) - same reasons and math.

anton (staff) wrote:1) Initially setup looks absolutely admirable.

2) There's not much use from SSD with StarWind at this moment unless you really know what you're doing... Better use cheap SATA in RAID 1/10 and tons of RAM we're going to convert into distributed write-back cache.

3) RAID 5 and 6 suck... Use cheap SATA with killer value per terabyte, RAID 1/10 and tons of RAM. For the same money! Pretty much like 2) - same reasons and math.

Ok you got me thinking about my drives all over again ...lol
got the tons of ram part coved each box will have 32GB.

does the priceing of starwind go off the hosted LUN size (hope thats the right term) or the hosted data size.
If i have an array that is 4tb but will only have 1500GB of data do i need a 2tb licence or a 4 tb licence

if its the total array size then if useing slower but huge SATA drives, do you recomend just getting the number of spendles to get the speed you need and partion just a smaller size to match the licence?


have you ever tryed mixing the raid styles like i proposed in the last part of my previous post?

BTW thanks for the great and quick input.
Clayton

does the priceing of starwind go off the hosted LUN size (hope thats the right term) or the hosted data size.
If i have an array that is 4tb but will only have 1500GB of data do i need a 2tb licence or a 4 tb licence. if its the total array size then if useing slower but huge SATA drives, do you recomend just getting the number of spendles to get the speed you need and partion just a smaller size to match the licence?

2 TB license covers a total of 2TB image files on each server (Since HA is a network RAID1) the size of the array itself is not important.

have you ever tryed mixing the raid styles like i proposed in the last part of my previous post?

HA does usually run on 2 servers which are nearly equal in terms of performance. If they will have different RAIDs with similar performance the only problem you may meet is to configure the whole zoo for max perfomance