Question on Starwind Virtual SAN and data reduction features

[finnzi]

Hi all,

I'm looking at Starwind Virtual SAN as the storage for a new virtual environment.
The solution would be running on bare metal, with Xeon 5th gen CPUs (probably 2x16C CPUs per node, 256GB RAM or more per node), on all NVMe enterprise disks. Probably using software raid.
Storage servers would have at least 2x100G Ethernet connections, possibly 4x100G.
Hosts would connect using iSCSI or NVMe/tcp.
Volumes would either be large VMFS datastores, VMware vVols (if the hypervisors are VMware).

I haven't used the product, but I am wondering if using data reduction features affects the performance of the solution?
Are there any baseline numbers one could expect from data reduction features for general compute servers? (i.e: could I expect 2:1 reduction)?

Are there any public guidelines on how one should spec out the storage nodes (i.e x CPU cores, x amount of RAM)?

Bgrds,
Finnzi

[yaroslav (staff)]

Welcome to StarWind Forum.
Please see the guides https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... al_papers/ and the system requirements https://www.starwindsoftware.com/system-requirements. If deployed as a VM, the solution comes preconfigured with minimum amount of RAM and number of vCPUs.
iSCSI will be a bottleneck in this system, I believe.
The performance impact of iSCSI should be addressed by NVMe-oF/TCP implementation that should be available for the highly available targets in mid Q4 this year.
Data deduplication and compression should be available down the road (not now).

P.S. Please reach out to my colleague who provided you with the key and ask about trialing and a tech call. I guess it will be much simpler to discuss your questions during a call.

Good luck with your setup!

[finnzi]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes - I'll reach out to your colleague when I'm back from my vacation. I've just been trying to find answers for some of my questions in the documentation and feel like some of it is not up to date.

You say that data reduction features are going to be out soon - are they not yet available in the current version?

Bgrds,
Finnur

[yaroslav (staff)]

The documentation reflects on the recommended way to configure StarWind VSAN sogtware. The one with GUI, must be up-to-date. You just need to look for a right scenario.
As of dedupe and compression, I have no ETA for them being introduced, sadly.
Have a nice vacation and see you at the tech call