Where is my data actually stored?

quarky · Mon Nov 03, 2014 10:36 am

Hello,

I have been thought the quickstart guide for the VSAN on VMware, but find it a little light on detail.

Obviously I am storing my StarWind volumes on the physical disks on the servers, but if I want a VM replicated between a pair of servers, I need to create a device on my Windows 2012 server (a virtual server running on the ESXi host) running the VSAN product and present this to the hypervisor as an iSCSI target?

So when I create a VM in that container, am I creating:

* A VM on the iSCSI volume presented to the ESXi host
* Which is actually a device on the Starwinds VSAN
* Which is located on a "local" GPT formatted "disk" on the Windows 2012 Server VM
* Which is hosted on a datastore on the ESXi server
* Which is stored on the local disk.

So when sizing my local ESXi datastore, it needs to be big enough to cover all of that.

quarky · Tue Nov 04, 2014 8:58 am

Can someone please confirm if my thinking is correct? I am quite keen on proposing StarWind as a solution for some of our sites, but need to have a better understanding of how it works.

Tue Nov 04, 2014 2:06 pm

Correct assumptions except:

* Which is located on a "local" GPT formatted "disk" on the Windows 2012 Server VM

It is actually a set of files put on a local NTFS / ReFS formatted partition inside a Windows running VM.

quarky wrote:Can someone please confirm if my thinking is correct? I am quite keen on proposing StarWind as a solution for some of our sites, but need to have a better understanding of how it works.

quarky · Tue Nov 04, 2014 2:52 pm

Super, thanks for that. It gives me a much better understanding of how to arrange my disks in testing this out!

Tue Nov 04, 2014 5:16 pm

You're welcomed. Does it make sense to put the "sandwich" description into VMware vSphere documents / WPs?

quarky wrote:Super, thanks for that. It gives me a much better understanding of how to arrange my disks in testing this out!

quarky · Wed Nov 05, 2014 2:04 pm

Yes I think it does. It looks convoluted, but it helps people to understand how the system is setup too.

Wed Nov 05, 2014 4:34 pm

OK, thank you for suggestion, we'll do

quarky wrote:Yes I think it does. It looks convoluted, but it helps people to understand how the system is setup too.