starwind as alternative for stormagic

[barrysmoke]

If I were to try to improve upon my stormagic design(where storage is passed through to san vm with vmware direcpath for direct control)
with starwind, I have 2 options:
1)vmware environment with local datastore for san os(this could be a raid card, with 2 ssd's, or a fuzion io), windows server as virtual san os, with raid card passed through, windows mounts raid volume as d:, starwind iscsi san with replication/2 node cluster(under 16TB limit on windows 2008)

2)hyperv with a fuzion io partitioned so that main os runs from a 20 to 40 gig c:, and the remaining space used as cache for the iscsi san.

are these the most optimal ways to run starwind under the 2 environments?
if a ramdisk were used, where would I put it in the above scenarios? I know that v6 has a ramdisk option, but not sure how to use it/where in the config...when creating an ha on v6, you can only specify cache size, not where it is stored. I also see when a virtual disk is created, there is a swap disk as well....could this be placed on faster storage for increased speed/performance?

hmm, according to this, using their direct api might be needed to achieve record breaking numbers...
http://www.fusionio.com./press-releases ... -iodrive2/

[barrysmoke]

ouch, list price for the 365 gig card is $6k.

[Anatoly (staff)]

Wow! That thing should be able to fly.

[anton (staff)]

It worth having own driver for FusionIO to map their PCIe as a proper disk (fast one) then to export and API everybody need to deploy for acceleration.

No system wide integration = no future. Does not matter how fast they can go. Will you buy a car with a steering stick and 10 pedals instead of a steering wheel and 3 pedals? No? I would not either. The same about "private API to fly". Make. This. System. Wide. Thanks!

[mkaishar]

Upgrade to R2 and use SSDs as a write back cache for StarWind images. StarWind V6 will provide RAM cache and Windows will do flash cache.
Upcoming V8 will do both + mirroring of cache between the nodes (something Windows cannot do). If you don't want to upgrade to R2 and V8 then "magic hardware" is the only bet.

I would like some more details on this, we are on v6 with 2 separate 2-node HA clusters using R720xd's, R710s, multiple 10Gbe and multiple MD1220s, MD1200s with SAS, NL-SAS & SATA, some in RAID-0, some in RAID-10, some in RAID-50 (I know I know) we needed the storage capacity over performance at the time of implementation.

But I would like to research W2K12R2 and SSD as WB cache, are there any whitepapers or testing results from ST?

Also any recommended 40Gbe Nics for sync channels?

[anton (staff)]

We don't recommend to use Microsoft flash cache implementation. Tons of reasons (they don't know the real workload above them as they sit too low in the storage stack and we do, they burn the flash cells and we don't with log structure etc). So you'd better wait or experiment with V8 for this.

For 40 Gbe gear we recommend Mellanox. Google for performance report PDFs there are some.

Upgrade to R2 and use SSDs as a write back cache for StarWind images. StarWind V6 will provide RAM cache and Windows will do flash cache.
Upcoming V8 will do both + mirroring of cache between the nodes (something Windows cannot do). If you don't want to upgrade to R2 and V8 then "magic hardware" is the only bet.

I would like some more details on this, we are on v6 with 2 separate 2-node HA clusters using R720xd's, R710s, multiple 10Gbe and multiple MD1220s, MD1200s with SAS, NL-SAS & SATA, some in RAID-0, some in RAID-10, some in RAID-50 (I know I know) we needed the storage capacity over performance at the time of implementation.

But I would like to research W2K12R2 and SSD as WB cache, are there any whitepapers or testing results from ST?

Also any recommended 40Gbe Nics for sync channels?

[kspare]

Anton, you just told me in another post to pull my ssd's from cachecade and use 2012r2 ssd cache? And guys sure do know how to confuse us.

[anton (staff)]

Windows does no block-level RAM cache (except read-only CSV cache which is another story) and write-backs writes to flash before placing them to spindle. Using flash wear leveling layer. This approach burns cells as small and non-aligned writes need to go to flash all the time (Windows cannot keep data in L1 cache as there's no L1 cache and TTL for dirty block is over).

CacheCade does the same as Windows does but it has L1 cache so it's just a little bit better (L1 cache of a limited size). So they are more or less indentical in terms of a flash life with Windows.

StarWind does RAM caching in write-back mode and uses by default flash in write-thru mode (switchable to write-back) using own huge block wear leveling layer if it needs to update data on flash. This approach burns LESS cells then Windows flash caching *and* CacheCade.

So you can use Windows flash cache. But we don't recommend it and prefer you to stick with StarWind. We don't charge for this feature either way

Anton, you just told me in another post to pull my ssd's from cachecade and use 2012r2 ssd cache? And guys sure do know how to confuse us.

[kspare]

Your current production software V6 does all of this?

[anton (staff)]

V6 = RAM

V8 = RAM and Flash

Your current production software V6 does all of this?

[mkaishar]

We don't recommend to use Microsoft flash cache implementation. Tons of reasons (they don't know the real workload above them as they sit too low in the storage stack and we do, they burn the flash cells and we don't with log structure etc). So you'd better wait or experiment with V8 for this.

I will wait for V8...what's the time frame for full production release?

For 40 Gbe gear we recommend Mellanox.

Thanks

Google for performance report PDFs there are some.

I know I can google, but I wanted to know directly from my primary vendor (YOU) if you do your own deep dive performance testing

Upgrade to R2 and use SSDs as a write back cache for StarWind images. StarWind V6 will provide RAM cache and Windows will do flash cache.
Upcoming V8 will do both + mirroring of cache between the nodes (something Windows cannot do). If you don't want to upgrade to R2 and V8 then "magic hardware" is the only bet.

Thanks, this is a good possibility, but in my readings, Windows Flash Cache will NOT work with RAID systems, I must use Storage Spaces, is this correct?

Speaking of LSI CachCade, we have a small dev environment using those with HyperV and free ST and it seems to work very well especially using SATA-II HDDs behind inexpensive Kingston SATA SSD drives.
Again this is a dev environment and clearly not being utilized the way our production is, but for the cost for the CacheCade was worth it in my opinion.

[anton (staff)]

Beta-3 should be out this or next week and two more iterations for RC1 and RC2. I guess around a month.

Sorry if I've sounded rude I did not mean it. Sure here's a link:

http://download.intel.com/support/netwo ... scsiwp.pdf

They did 1.25M IOPS later with an updated hardware but I cannot find it for some reason.

Yes, you need to use Storage Spaces to do a flash cache and we've found an issue (the one BTW preventing MS target from working with this scenario) so it does not work YET.

We'll do our best so Windows guys would be able to build an inexpensive clusters utilizing existing hypervisor hosts, cheap SATA and consumer SSDs. Something VMware people are expected to do with a VSAN.

We don't recommend to use Microsoft flash cache implementation. Tons of reasons (they don't know the real workload above them as they sit too low in the storage stack and we do, they burn the flash cells and we don't with log structure etc). So you'd better wait or experiment with V8 for this.

I will wait for V8...what's the time frame for full production release?

For 40 Gbe gear we recommend Mellanox.

Thanks

Google for performance report PDFs there are some.

I know I can google, but I wanted to know directly from my primary vendor (YOU) if you do your own deep dive performance testing

Upgrade to R2 and use SSDs as a write back cache for StarWind images. StarWind V6 will provide RAM cache and Windows will do flash cache.
Upcoming V8 will do both + mirroring of cache between the nodes (something Windows cannot do). If you don't want to upgrade to R2 and V8 then "magic hardware" is the only bet.

Thanks, this is a good possibility, but in my readings, Windows Flash Cache will NOT work with RAID systems, I must use Storage Spaces, is this correct?

Speaking of LSI CachCade, we have a small dev environment using those with HyperV and free ST and it seems to work very well especially using SATA-II HDDs behind inexpensive Kingston SATA SSD drives.
Again this is a dev environment and clearly not being utilized the way our production is, but for the cost for the CacheCade was worth it in my opinion.