StarWind Software

Hello,
Does Starwind have any recommended settings for ESXi servers (other than the post that deals with mpio settings). Specifically, I want to ensure the least latency back to the Starwind SANs I'm moving to production.

I have two nodes in an HA setup.. Each node has two NICs connected directly to each of my two vsphere hosts.. So each vsphere host has 4 connections to my HA setup, no switches in the way.

I found this document from VMware when troubleshooting previous issues with my Equallogic SANs: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1002598

Any good bits in here for the Starwind setup?

Thanks,
Elvis

Well, as you can see this is Vmware who published this document about that hardware SAN, so I think they should bring up similar one with StarWind and I haven`t heard if they have one to be honest.

The performance of our solution is limited by the hardware of the server where it is running – mostly it is limited by the wire speed. As you may know Intel and Microsoft achieved 1000000 result in their result using StarWind as the SAN solution (to learn more about it you can use this link: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/news/32). So everything is basically needed (and this is not the easiest part), is properly configured system.

I will provide you with some recommendations and hints below if you don`t mind
Recommended RAID for implementing an HA are RAID 1, 0 or 10, RAID 5 or 6 are not recommended due to low write performance.
The performance of a RAID array directly depends on the Stripe Size used. There are no exact recommendations of which stripe size to use. It is a test-based choice. As best practice we recommend at first step to set recommended by vendor and run tests. Then set a bigger value and run tests again. In third step set a smaller value and test again. These 3 results should guide you to the optimal stripe size value to set. In some configuration smaller stripe size value like 4k or 8k give better performance and in some other cases 64k, 128k or even 256k values will give better performance.
Performance of the HA will depend on the performance of the RAID array used. It’s up to the customer to determine the optimal stripe size.

I would also recommended to take a look at the topics from our forum, which should help you in the network tunning:
General: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... tml#p12187
For ESX: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... tml#p12194
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... tml#p14539

Also I think our Best Practices documentation that you can find by using the link below should be helpful for you as well.
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwin ... ces-manual
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwin ... ice-manual