2-node Hyperconverged setup

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cwhitmore
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2014 5:11 pm

Fri Oct 20, 2017 1:55 am

I plan to setup a two node Hyperconverged cluster with Starwind VSAN free and Windows 2016 HyperV. I've setup four 500GB disks (all are hardware RAID 10), attached to my Hyper-V / Starwind server. The install instructions say to create volumes with drive letters in Windows Server first. If these drives are going to be served back to the local server using iSCSI do I still need to create local volumes with drive letters for each disk?
Also, when creating a device in Starwind there is the option for physical disk or virtual disk. If these "devices" are going to be cluster shared volumes wouldn't the performance be faster if I created physical disks?
Boris (staff)
Staff
Posts: 805
Joined: Fri Jul 28, 2017 8:18 am

Sat Oct 21, 2017 12:38 pm

cwhitmore,

You can create volumes on top of StarWind disks connected via iSCSI with or without letters. This is up to you. But I have a feeling we speak about different steps. Could you be more specific on the when you assign the letters to the drives?
As far as physical disk is concerned, if you select this option, you will present you whole drive via iSCSI. In case you need have Cluster Shared Volumes of a size that is smaller than 500 GB (which I believe is your RAID array size, right?), you will not be able to do so. With StarWind virtual disks, you can create e.g. 10 disks 50GB each on top of a single 500GB physical disk. Further, these can be added to the cluster as 10 separate CSVs.
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