Question regarding SYNC channels in Stardwind 6

[jmchristy]

Hello,

Currently, my 2 SANS have the following.

NIC1 = 2x10GBps ports
NIC2 = 4x1GBps ports
NIC3 = 4x1GBps ports
NIC4 = 2x1GBps onboard ports

I plan on creating 5 HA targets, 3HA targets will by 500GB, 1 will be 200GB, and the last one will be 800GB.

What are the best practices for the SYNC channel? I want some kind of redundancy for my physical network cards in case one fails. I planned on using 1 of the 10GB ports for the 3HA 500GB targets, and the other one for the 2HA 200GB & 800GB targets. Then I'd simply have 2 1GB ports for each of them as a backup, but in testing this during a sync the 1GB ports were showing 20% utilizatino, while the 10GB port only showed 1%.

Am I over complicating this? Do I need to separate my SYNC channels or is it best practices to have all your LUN's just share a common physical SYNC channel? If so, can I force Starwind to use the 10GBps path over the 1GBps path? Or does that even matter?

Thanks!

[Max (staff)]

Hi jmchristy,
Right now we do not support using different bandwidthed cards together on the sync channel.
It will be better if you could team them in a "failover only" mode.
However the Synchronization redundancy is not critical untill you're running more than 1 heartbeat channel.
Moreover, heartbeat channels can reside on all NIC ports, they're only used to check the second server's status if the sync channel is not available.
I would recommend to build an HA using 1 10 GbE NIC for the sync and 1 GbE NIC for the client connection.
If you get good benchmark results on this configuration then you can expand the bandwidth.
This will allow you to pinpoint the spot where the configuration looses performance