StarWind Software

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.