Hello, StarWind community. I have been working on a proof of concept to get my home environment off of TrueNAS and onto an HA storage backend. StarWind seems like the best (and only) free solution that suits my needs. Unfortunately (for me anyway) there are some potential deal breakers. I'm hoping someone can help me out with some of it.
Here are the items that I need some guidance with:
Is there a functional difference between Virtual SAN and the virtual HCI appliance once setup has been completed? They both look the same in the quickstart guides, but I find myself wondering if some of my other issues (see below) might be addressed by changing products.
Is there a way to conduct a graceful/gentle shutdown of the VSAN cluster during a power outage? I can get a UPS if I need one (which seems likely), but I do not have access to a backup power source for sustained power loss. The closest solution I could find was some documentation on integrating with APC PowerChute, but it's from 2018 and appears to be for VSAN deployed as an application on Windows which (I think) has been deprecated.
Can VSAN be configured to only replicate missing/differing information to unsynchronized nodes? If I simulate a power outage by abruptly shutting down the cluster then starting it back up, I need to mark one node as synchronized and then wait for the partner node to be completely overwritten. This leaves the cluster in a vulnerable state for a longer period of time, so I would like to avoid it if at all possible. To simplify this scenario, assume that all hosts connecting to the cluster are using MPIO in 'Fail Over Only' mode instead of 'Round Robin' or 'Least Queue Depth' modes.
As I mentioned above, I'm coming from TrueNAS which has very good support for a lot of advanced ZFS features. VSAN doesn't seem to have nearly the same level of robust support. In fact, it was very challenging to even get vdevs added to a pool. I tested by creating a 3-disk RAIDZ1 pool. I was able to add another 3-disk vdev to the pool by going to 'Storage pools/Manage pool/Layout' in the web UI and changing the pool layout, but I can only do that once. After that, the 'adjust pool layout' button is disabled. How to add disks to the pool from that point on is incredibly difficult to decipher and I have only been able to add hot spares. Is this a bug in the current version of the CVM, or is ZFS support just not very good? I was able to manually add a vdev via the command line, but this is very undesirable since I don't know what I could be potentially breaking by doing so.
I know that's a lot to ask, or at least it seems like it is, but between the various different iterations of VSAN over the years and a lack of updated documentation for similar features in newer versions, I'm at a loss here. The power loss issues in particular are real show stoppers for me since this is a home environment and we get some pretty ugly winter storms that can knock power out for a few hours at a time. I appreciate any advice and guidance anyone is willing to offer.
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