StarWind Software

I am in the process of setting up a SAN for my lab environment and was looking at startwind, but there are a couple things I am looking for and would like to know if starwind can do this.

1. Would like the ability to not need a raid controller, If I use independent disk, can I use starwind volumes in a raid configuration on those disk. I know I can use windows software raid but not sure what impact that will have on performance.
2. Can I configure starwind volumes so that if I need to grow the disk over time I can. (i.e I have 3 1TB disk I am planning on using, I would like the ability over time to replace 1 disk with a larger disk (3TB) and then grow the volume as all the disk are replaced.) Similar to how drobo's work.
3. I have an SSD drive that I would like to use to speed up disk access to the 1TB disk, is this possible?

I currently have a ZFS SAN setup but it is slow and looking to move away from that configuration. I will be using it to run virtual machines and I have found out that zfs is not good for running virtual machines unless you have tones of memory.

the hardware I have for this SAN is a 3 core phenom processor, 4gig of ram, quad port gigabit ethernet adapter, and 3 1-TB HDDs for new system. My old SAN has 3 1-TBB HDD, 1 128 SAS disk, and 120GIG SSD that will be moved to new SAN once storage is migrated.

1) You create a simple (RAID1 or RAID0) Windows software RAID (no decent and recent Storage Spaces as they are dog slow) on top of your LUs and then you layer StarWind containers (FLAT or LSFS does not matter) on top of these volumes. File system (NTFS) and RAID (LVM) are both used in basically pass-thru mode so there's no extra processing overhead. In some upcoming version we'll consider an ability to work with raw disks and span over different LUs.

2) Yes, you can. That's a long-term production scenario: increase capacity on one partner, re-sync, increase capacity on the other, re-sync and enjoy. We do however recommend using new Scale-Out features so you'll just bring more partner(s) on-the-fly w/o re-syncs and putting nodes down for capacity growth. Drobo has no HA so I have no idea what similar technology you're talking about.

3) Sure. V8 has an ability to use flash-as-a-cache so you'll have L2ARC-like feature from ZFS (RAM would be used as a L1 cache so think about ZFS ARC).

I agree. ZFS is a great general-purpose file system but for typical VM workload something different should be used.

Your hardware config should be fine. Except I'd recommend to run storage on the same hardware where hypervisor runs as it's much cheaper and faster.