StarWind Software

Since v6 now supports Clustered Scale-Out NAS:

Using Server 2012, does the NAS support:
1) SMB 3.0
2) Hyper-V VMs from the file share

Yes, absolutely. That's was one of the scenarious it was created for.

If v6 is used as NAS, is this kinda what the architecture would look like? With iSCSI replacing the FC?



Image is provided courtesy of http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/win ... san-143844

Yes and no. Yes, you can do it but you'll have to configure SoFS manually. Here we are:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/sw-prov ... le-servers

Also you can skip using FC or iSCSI as a back end and use SoFS directly running StarWind on top of them. So you don't have physical shared storage. Here we are:

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/sw-conf ... le-servers

And here are some feedback from people using this design efficiently:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... cee3c0c70d

Built-in NAS configurator allows you to create simple NAS (CIFS/SMB or NFS) failover cluster on top of StarWind so you'll be able to either
provide HA file share to your users or to keep VHD images and run Hyper-V from it (as what you wanted). But SoFS is preferred here as it allows to have som extra benefits (SMB Direct, pseudo-multipath based on DNS and so on).

Anton, thx for the links. I'll start reading & studying asap!

My preferred scenario is - StarWind running directly on SoFS servers. If you cannot manage skip using them and cannot install StarWind directly on Hyper-V nodes (w/o any external hardware).

awedio wrote:Anton, thx for the links. I'll start reading & studying asap!

On the Technet forum VR38DETT (Starwind employee) said

V6 is out and it can do both. You may however will to wait for upcoming one with log-structuring to fight I/O blender and flash level cache. Fow now dedupe is slowing down I/O but it will increase IOPS.

Anton,

Can you share more info on "..log-structuring to fight I/O blender and flash level cache"?

Sure. Upcoming version of StarWind (the one we have under heavy development) has log-structured file system. Component completely eliminating random writes killing virtualized environments.
It's VM I/O-aware layer, something similar to what Virsto and Tintri do. It does all writes in sequential way with a huge pages (good for big stripe RAIDs and also good for SSDs). And we'll add flash memory as L2 cache to already existing L1 cache (RAM).

awedio wrote:On the Technet forum VR38DETT (Starwind employee) said

V6 is out and it can do both. You may however will to wait for upcoming one with log-structuring to fight I/O blender and flash level cache. Fow now dedupe is slowing down I/O but it will increase IOPS.

Anton,

Can you share more info on "..log-structuring to fight I/O blender and flash level cache"?

anton (staff) wrote:My preferred scenario is - StarWind running directly on SoFS servers. If you cannot manage skip using them and cannot install StarWind directly on Hyper-V nodes (w/o any external hardware).

You mean using the NAS configurator & have Starwind as "backend" storage for the FS?

anton (staff) wrote:Sure. Upcoming version of StarWind (the one we have under heavy development) has log-structured file system. Component completely eliminating random writes killing virtualized environments.
It's VM I/O-aware layer, something similar to what Virsto and Tintri do. It does all writes in sequential way with a huge pages (good for big stripe RAIDs and also good for SSDs). And we'll add flash memory as L2 cache to already existing L1 cache (RAM).

awedio wrote:On the Technet forum VR38DETT (Starwind employee) said

V6 is out and it can do both. You may however will to wait for upcoming one with log-structuring to fight I/O blender and flash level cache. Fow now dedupe is slowing down I/O but it will increase IOPS.

Anton,

Can you share more info on "..log-structuring to fight I/O blender and flash level cache"?

The logs can use dedicated SSDs (like Virsto). Will this be v7?

Another post from VR38DETT

Take a look at DataCore as another good example of properly implemented caching thing (they even do use polling stealing CPU cycles in favor of faster I/O response) under Windows. Solaris/FreeBSD have ZFS with multi-level (RAM and SSD, something we're still missing...) ARC. That thing shines

Why is Starwind missing "multi-level ARC" (like ZFS)?

Or is this part of the upcoming version (the one you say is under heavy development)

We'll release flash as a second level cache pretty soon.

awedio wrote:Another post from VR38DETT

Take a look at DataCore as another good example of properly implemented caching thing (they even do use polling stealing CPU cycles in favor of faster I/O response) under Windows. Solaris/FreeBSD have ZFS with multi-level (RAM and SSD, something we're still missing...) ARC. That thing shines

Why is Starwind missing "multi-level ARC" (like ZFS)?

Or is this part of the upcoming version (the one you say is under heavy development)

Is the new version in beta yet?

Alpha... No public beta yet.

awedio wrote:Is the new version in beta yet?

anton (staff) wrote:
Built-in NAS configurator allows you to create simple NAS (CIFS/SMB or NFS) failover cluster on top of StarWind so you'll be able to either
provide HA file share to your users or to keep VHD images and run Hyper-V from it (as what you wanted). But SoFS is preferred here as it allows to have some extra benefits (SMB Direct, pseudo-multipath based on DNS and so on).

I need to go back & look. I somehow missed the NAS configurator