Help With Hardware

1ndian · Wed Jul 22, 2015 11:44 am

Hi,
I'm new to this product and recently downloaded a trial. My question is regarding the hardware I plan to buy to create virtual SAN

I'm thinking of the following:
HP DL380 Gen9 24SFF Server x2
Intel Xeon E5-2603 v3 1.6GHz. 6-Core Processor x1
HP 32GB PC4-2133 L-RDIMM
12G 300GB 10K SAS HDD x2 for OS
12G 300GB 10K SAS HDD x22 for DATA
12G 200GB 10K SAS SDD x1 for caching
12G 300GB 10K SAS HDD x1 for Spare
Gigabit Network Interfaces x12

Is this is a good configuration for setting up virtual SAN? I want to know about the processor especially. Internet says, it's a basic processor. Will that be a problem for a dedicated SAN? E5-2650 processors are very expensive. Memory 32GB is sufficient? I will basically use this to store SQL databases and Exchange Databases and to support a file server cluster. We've around 100-150 users across SQL, Exchange and File Server.
Please let me know of all the expert suggestions.

Thanking you in advance
1ndian

1ndian · Thu Jul 23, 2015 3:09 am

anyone?

darklight · Thu Jul 23, 2015 8:27 am

Hi 1ndian,

If you plan to use these servers as dedicated VSAN storage and not going to run VM's or other services on them, then your CPU and configuration is pretty OK.
I am just curious about 12 x 1GBit NICs, maybe consider using a couple of 10GBit NICs instead.

1ndian · Sat Jul 25, 2015 10:44 am

Thank you darknight,

regarding the NICs, yea I could go for 10Gb. But all my other network components (Switches, firewalls) are either 10/100 or 10/100/1000Gb. Plus I rather use multiple ports for SMB multi-path than using couple of 10Gb ports.

If you have any suggestions, please do reply.

regards,
1ndian

Tue Jul 28, 2015 2:49 pm

Hi everyone,

Since StarWind Virtual SAN is hardware agnostic, it can run on top of any hardware which meets our system requirements:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/system-requirements

Additional compute or storage power has to be configured according to expected workload running on the same system, where StarWind is or will be installed. The additional compute power requirement have to be determined by the end-user.

The only thing:
Please use 10 Gb NIC for sync purposes, since sync channel speed is 1 of 2 things that my slows down your Virtual SAN significantly. The second thing is a storage itself.