StarWind Software

Hi there,

I just recently built my two nodes starwind system.

I populated 8+1 drive Samsung Pro 850 1tb in Raid 6 with 1 drive hot spare. I know RAID 6 is not ideal, but I don't see that much of a performance improvement over at RAID 10, plus I need more spaces
On the same node, I only have a 30TB volume, which I would put a L2 cache on it.

My question is do I still need to setup L1/L2 cache for my SSD volume? I want to something on top of it to buffer the read/write so it would prolong my SSD drives' life.
Is there a particular image that I should use for SSD? Or LSFS with dedupe is still recommended ?

For the L2 cache, since it's frequently read/write, do I need to purchase an enterprise level SSD for it?

Lastly, can I setup my 2nodes as hyper-converged with Hyper-v, and at the same time, dash out iSCSI to other Hyper-V servers to use?

Thanks!

Hi,
I believe L1 cache like "RAM disk" is much faster than Solid State Drives, so it can boost performance on write/read operation in WB mode.
By the way, to my understanding, the cache still write information to your disks, so it can`t prolong your SSD life significantly.
Since LSFS require more space on local storage it could be too expensive on SSDs I also wouldn’t like to spend money for L2 cache on ENT SSD
As far as I remember you can not install free version with Hyper-V. I use NFR version and it allows me to connect StarWind anywhere.

Yes the cache still write informaotin to my disks, but I thought if there is a buffer in between, it will not be as much read/write.

Oh I have paid version

Why don't you asked support engineers directly? To clarify this information

My question is do I still need to setup L1/L2 cache for my SSD volume?
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We do not recommend using cache on SSD from the point of view of performance.

Is there a particular image that I should use for SSD? Or LSFS with dedupe is still recommended ?
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LSFS was created for slow spindle drives. And it could be increased in 3 times (+200%) with snapshots and deduplication.
Thus, I recommend using img file for SSD.

For the L2 cache, since it's frequently read/write, do I need to purchase an enterprise level SSD for it?
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L2 cache much better to use for boosting spindle drives as well. Enterprise level of SSD should be better.

Lastly, can I setup my 2nodes as hyper-converged with Hyper-v, and at the same time, dash out iSCSI to other Hyper-V servers to use?
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Yes, you can do it. However, make shure that another hosts are in cluster as well.