StarWind Software

Hello everyone,

I’m in the process of building up a home lab environment using VMware vSphere, and I’m looking for a cost effective 2 or 4 TB centralized storage solution to run virtual machines on. I need it to support both vMotion, Storage vMotion. I’m trying to determine if I should go with a software solution like StarWind, the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator or maybe FreeNAS. Or I should purchase a dedicated NAS appliance from Synology (DS412+), Qnap (569L), or Netgear, etc.

With that being said, I have four (4) of the identical systems listed below and was thinking of using one of them as a software NAS, and the other three as VMware ESXi hosts. I believe my hardware meets all the requirements to run a software NAS, but I concerned about performance. How does Starwind’s performance compare to that of a dedicated NAS appliance? What about cost? As I can purchase a dedicated NAS appliance for about $600, and the only capacity limits are the size of the drives and device slots. If I buy a dedicated NAS appliance I free up another system to run VMware ESXi on. What’s the learning curve and how much time do I have to spend tweaking it? After reading some of the FreeNAS forums I got the impression I would have to spend weeks testing and tuning it to make it work.

HP Z600 Workstation (4 of each)
Intel® Xeon® Processor X5650 6 Core 2.66GHz, 12M cache, 6.40GT/s QPI, DDR3 1333MHz, HT, Turbo
24GB's RAM (PC3-10600 DDR3-1333 ECC Registered DIMMs)
6-SATA 3.0 Gb/s Interface with Integrated SATA 3.0 Gb/s RAID Controller (0/1/5/10)
*WD VelociRaptor WD1600HLHX 160GB 10K RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5
2 internal 3.5" bays and 2 external 5.25" bays
HP 16X DVD-ROM SATA Drive
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 256MB PCIe Graphics Card
Single Integrated Broadcom Gigabit LAN
Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port LP Server Adapter
650W 85% (80PLUS) Efficient Power Supply
See: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quic ... 277_na.PDF

*Note: The VelociRaptor’s will be replaced with two or four 2TB Western Digital Red NAS or Seagate NAS hard drives (which are better?) in a RAID 1 or 10 configuration.

I have planned on using two (2) Netgear GS108Tv2 ProSafe 8-port Gigabit Smart Switchs, one for the data network and one for storage network with jumbo frames enabled, See: http://www.netgear.com/images/gs108tv2_ ... 8-5336.pdf

Thank you in advance for any constructive information.

It's a bad idea to use any network storage. First of all it's slow (all I/O touches the wire) and second it's expensive as it's basically a re-badged SATA/SAS drives + some active/passive components. You need to install StarWind inside a VM on every vSphere host you have and cluster them. That solution (with 2 nodes) is a fully supported and is already included into Beta-3 so I would encourage you to try. In this case all I/O is local (reads never touch the wire and writes only get "confirmed" with a partner) so is fast. And you don't lose any of your hardware systems to be serving just I/O needs.

Anton,

Thank you for the quick reply.

Just so everyone is clear, I was planning on taking one of my HP Z600 Workstations and adding two or four 2TB Western Digital Red NAS or Seagate NAS hard drives and creating a RAID 1 or 10 volume. Install Windows 2008R2 or 2012R2 server and StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS. I would dedicate four 1Gb NIC’s for iSCSI to a physical dedicated switch with jumbo frames enabled. Then I would the take the remaining three HP Z600 Workstations and install ESXi 5.5 on them and dedicate two 1Gb NIC’s for iSCSI to a physical dedicated switch with jumbo frames enabled.

Your saying that it’s going to be too slow and I should taking two of my HP Z600 Workstations and adding two or four 2TB Western Digital Red NAS or Seagate NAS hard drives and creating a RAID 1 or 10 volume. Then install ESXi 5.5 on them, create a Windows 2008R2 or 2012R2 virtual machine and install StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS. What would be the minimum resource requirements for this virtual machine (vCPU, vRAM, Disk, etc...)? Remember my ESXi host only have 24 GB’s of RAM each. Also would this be a filesystem (VMFS) running on a filesystem NTFS, running on a filesystem (NTFS)? Before I add any virtual machines to it? What about the other two HP Z600 Workstations?

Is there a document or white paper that that shows the layout and configuration?

Install StarWind VSA on a two vSphere nodes and create mirrored LUN (better two of them). Use it for VM storage. Add two nodes
to vSphere cluster either VSA-less or using own VSA pair. That would bring you more computing power and performance as I/O would be local.

StarWind is clustered software so many features are expected to work in a 2+ node config (huge write back cache for example).

ProTard wrote:Anton,

Thank you for the quick reply.

Just so everyone is clear, I was planning on taking one of my HP Z600 Workstations and adding two or four 2TB Western Digital Red NAS or Seagate NAS hard drives and creating a RAID 1 or 10 volume. Install Windows 2008R2 or 2012R2 server and StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS. I would dedicate four 1Gb NIC’s for iSCSI to a physical dedicated switch with jumbo frames enabled. Then I would the take the remaining three HP Z600 Workstations and install ESXi 5.5 on them and dedicate two 1Gb NIC’s for iSCSI to a physical dedicated switch with jumbo frames enabled.

Your saying that it’s going to be too slow and I should taking two of my HP Z600 Workstations and adding two or four 2TB Western Digital Red NAS or Seagate NAS hard drives and creating a RAID 1 or 10 volume. Then install ESXi 5.5 on them, create a Windows 2008R2 or 2012R2 virtual machine and install StarWind iSCSI SAN & NAS. What would be the minimum resource requirements for this virtual machine (vCPU, vRAM, Disk, etc...)? Remember my ESXi host only have 24 GB’s of RAM each. Also would this be a filesystem (VMFS) running on a filesystem NTFS, running on a filesystem (NTFS)? Before I add any virtual machines to it? What about the other two HP Z600 Workstations?

Is there a document or white paper that that shows the layout and configuration?

Anton,

Thank you again for the quick reply and please forgive my stupid questions as I’m new to software SAN’s. Where I work we use fiber channel, so iSCSI and NAS is new to me.

1.) Is the StarWind VSA part of the StarWind V8 Beta 3?
2.) What are the minimum resource requirements for the virtual machine’s running the StarWind VSA?
3.) How long is a StarWind V8 Beta 3 license key good for?
4.) Are NFR license keys available for StarWind products?

1) Yes
2) 1 vCPU, maybe gig of vRAM (more if you want to have more of a write back cache), more memory if you'll play with LSFS and dedupe
3) Typically 30-90 days but that's changing
4) Yes, tons of options (MVP, MCT, MCP, VARs, vExperts etc etc etc) so you may PM me and I'll bring you in touch with sales and we'll see what could be done

ProTard wrote:Anton,

Thank you again for the quick reply and please forgive my stupid questions as I’m new to software SAN’s. Where I work we use fiber channel, so iSCSI and NAS is new to me.

1.) Is the StarWind VSA part of the StarWind V8 Beta 3?
2.) What are the minimum resource requirements for the virtual machine’s running the StarWind VSA?
3.) How long is a StarWind V8 Beta 3 license key good for?
4.) Are NFR license keys available for StarWind products?