StarWind Software

Just testing starwind 8 in my lab (4 core box 2012 R2 with a couple of 1gb nics, 16Gb of RAM and a 4disk RAID 10 set plus 2 x 128Gb SSD).

I have carved out a single volume so far from my RAID 10 disk set to be used to hold virtual disks to be presented out to a couple of ESXi hosts. Before I format it I'd like to know what the best file system option is. Do I use ReFS or stick with NTFS?

Thanks

Andy

StarWind Virtual SAN does:

1) Bypass all the file systems for I/O (technically we just use FS to maintain a list of allocated blocks, also user "sees" volume content and can copy it somewhere say for backup)

2) Keep own strong 128-bit hashes of the data we deal with

3) Use other methods (synchronization with partners) to do rebuilds if we see volume is damaged

We don't care what you use as an underlying file system, NTFS or ReFS are the same to us.

AndyKnight wrote:Just testing starwind 8 in my lab (4 core box 2012 R2 with a couple of 1gb nics, 16Gb of RAM and a 4disk RAID 10 set plus 2 x 128Gb SSD).

I have carved out a single volume so far from my RAID 10 disk set to be used to hold virtual disks to be presented out to a couple of ESXi hosts. Before I format it I'd like to know what the best file system option is. Do I use ReFS or stick with NTFS?

Thanks

Andy

I had extensive discussions with anton on ReFS when I first started using Starwind Virtual San, the data integrity is very important to me, and I'm keeping an eye on this.
in my testing, all ReFS was much, much, much slower performance wise. This told me ReFS is not ready for primetime.

ReFS has no way to turn on integrity streams on running VMs (up to Windows Server 10) so it kills the whole point of using it. IMHO.

barrysmoke wrote:I had extensive discussions with anton on ReFS when I first started using Starwind Virtual San, the data integrity is very important to me, and I'm keeping an eye on this.
in my testing, all ReFS was much, much, much slower performance wise. This told me ReFS is not ready for primetime.

I used ReFS and Starwind for my lab environment and although I don't need rocket performance it's running great. Having said that I never did a perf benchmark with Starwind on ReFS and Starwind on NTFS so maybe I'm missing out on extra performance I could have had. Oh well, too much data to wipe and start again with now

Anton, can you explain you comment around integrity streams? I'm not 100% sure what you mean.

Thanks

Andy

1) With StarWind you're not going to see any differences as we do bypass file system for all I/Os. Technically we only use bitmap allocation and space reservation for our images. NTFS or ReFS does not matter.

2) ReFS in pre-Windows Server 10 cannot enable integrity checked for VHDX being a back end storage for running VMs. That's a serious issue and technically a show stopper for me. See:

http://windowsitpro.com/hyper-v/dont-use-refs-hyper-v

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Fo ... erverfiles

AndyKnight wrote:I used ReFS and Starwind for my lab environment and although I don't need rocket performance it's running great. Having said that I never did a perf benchmark with Starwind on ReFS and Starwind on NTFS so maybe I'm missing out on extra performance I could have had. Oh well, too much data to wipe and start again with now

Anton, can you explain you comment around integrity streams? I'm not 100% sure what you mean.

Thanks

Andy