v6 NAS question

Mon Sep 03, 2012 9:14 am

Feedback is appreciated.

dtrounce · Wed Sep 05, 2012 6:00 pm

anton (staff) wrote:My preferred scenario is - StarWind running directly on SoFS servers. If you cannot manage skip using them and cannot install StarWind directly on Hyper-V nodes (w/o any external hardware).

I agree. Also, if you run SOFS in VMs on the same servers, then you can also use the servers as Hyper-V hosts, as well as Starwind hosts and SOFS hosts.

You can't loop back application data storage (Hyper-V, SQL) to a network on the same SOFS.

Per http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134181
"Accessing a continuously available file share as a loopback share is not supported. For example, Microsoft SQL Server or Hyper-V storing their data files on SMB file shares must run on computers that are not a member of the file server cluster for the SMB file shares"

But putting SOFS in a VM avoids this issue. The VMs connect back to Starwind on the same hosts via MPIO iSCSI..

You need two clusters - one for SOFS in the VMs, and one for Hyper-V on all the hosts (not just the two servers hosting Starwind)

Fri Sep 07, 2012 1:39 pm

run SOFS in VMs on the same servers

Are you sure that you wont affect anything in any case?

dtrounce · Tue Oct 09, 2012 4:21 pm

I'm not sure. But it seems to work running the SOFS in VMs. The VMs have different IP addresses, and I am assuming that is what matters to avoid loopback.

Having said that, I am finding that traditional iSCSI connections from the Hyper-V hosts to the Starwind HA targets seems to be more reliable than SOFS, which seems to sometimes drop the connection from the Hyper-V hosts to the SOFS VM storage when one of the HA partners goes down for maintenance.

And iSCSI is less complex to set up for a small number of Hyper-V hosts than SOFS. I can see the attraction of SOFS when you have a large number of Hyper-V hosts. Then maybe you have separate physical servers for the SOFS storage and the Hyper-V hosts.

Tue Oct 09, 2012 5:56 pm

I see... Did you compare single and multi-host performance for iSCSI Vs. SoFS?

dtrounce wrote:I'm not sure. But it seems to work running the SOFS in VMs. The VMs have different IP addresses, and I am assuming that is what matters to avoid loopback.

Having said that, I am finding that traditional iSCSI connections from the Hyper-V hosts to the Starwind HA targets seems to be more reliable than SOFS, which seems to sometimes drop the connection from the Hyper-V hosts to the SOFS VM storage when one of the HA partners goes down for maintenance.

And iSCSI is less complex to set up for a small number of Hyper-V hosts than SOFS. I can see the attraction of SOFS when you have a large number of Hyper-V hosts. Then maybe you have separate physical servers for the SOFS storage and the Hyper-V hosts.

dtrounce · Tue Oct 09, 2012 6:27 pm

No - these are small test servers, to test reliability, not really performance.

Presumably SOFS might have better performance, as it can leverage SMB3 multi-channel and RDMA, with good IB or 10GbE network adapters. Though you do have round-robin iSCSI.

Tue Oct 09, 2012 6:41 pm

SMB 3.0 looks good on paper but on practice you don't have request split between different nodes (unless you have many nodes doing I/O). That's why I was asking about performance tests for real environments.

dtrounce wrote:No - these are small test servers, to test reliability, not really performance.

Presumably SOFS might have better performance, as it can leverage SMB3 multi-channel and RDMA, with good IB or 10GbE network adapters. Though you do have round-robin iSCSI.