Hi All
Currently I have two ESXi 6.5 hosts which both connect to a Windows Server 2016 machine which has Starwinds Virtual SAN installed and provides shared iSCSI storage to the two hosts.
The problem is, whenever I reboot the SAN (the Starwinds server) I end up with the following issues:
All I can do after these issues occur is restore the VMs that were on the problematic datastore(s) which is painful to do every time a reboot is done when updates are installed that require a reboot (at least monthly) on the SAN. These issues also screw up my Citrix environment.
Anyways, moving forward I wanted to change my storage since these issues are driving me crazy and my NFR license with Starwinds is going to expire in a few months and I'm not sure if it'll get renewed.
Currently I have 4 Samsung SM863 480GB drives in the Starwinds/SAN server which I use for my iSCSI storage. No RAID is used. Each drive is a datastore.
So I've been thinking of replacing the Starwinds Virtual SAN server with a Synology DiskStation DS1817+ (the 8GB memory model) and then adding a dual port 10Gb SFP NIC in the PCIe slot it has. I'll be direct attaching each host to each SPF port on the Synology (each host has only one SFP port).
I was thinking of either using the 4 Samsung SM863 drives as read/write cache and then adding 4 spinner HDDs for VM storage OR adding 4 more SM863 SSDs and using only SSD storage for the VM storage.
I currently run 25 VMs which use about 1.5TB in space but with Starwinds Virtual SAN I use dedupe so it uses much less that that...maybe 800GB. Not sure if the Synology does dedupe.
So would this be a better choice for storage? I don't want to have a Linux/Windows SAN anymore. I just want something that I can forget about and it will run for months at a time and not need (frequent) updates, reboots etc.
I did consider VSAN with a Witness appliance but have yet to find an affordable cache tier SSD for lab use.
Is the Synology a good choice for what I want to achieve? Not sure how good the performance would be running the VMs off of HDDs with SSD read/write cache and if 8GB of memory in the unit would be enough?
Currently I have two ESXi 6.5 hosts which both connect to a Windows Server 2016 machine which has Starwinds Virtual SAN installed and provides shared iSCSI storage to the two hosts.
The problem is, whenever I reboot the SAN (the Starwinds server) I end up with the following issues:
- An empty datastore - literally all VM files and folders are gone after the reboot
- Sometimes one host won't mount one of the datastores
- Sometimes the service needs to be restarted for the console to connect/work
All I can do after these issues occur is restore the VMs that were on the problematic datastore(s) which is painful to do every time a reboot is done when updates are installed that require a reboot (at least monthly) on the SAN. These issues also screw up my Citrix environment.
Anyways, moving forward I wanted to change my storage since these issues are driving me crazy and my NFR license with Starwinds is going to expire in a few months and I'm not sure if it'll get renewed.
Currently I have 4 Samsung SM863 480GB drives in the Starwinds/SAN server which I use for my iSCSI storage. No RAID is used. Each drive is a datastore.
So I've been thinking of replacing the Starwinds Virtual SAN server with a Synology DiskStation DS1817+ (the 8GB memory model) and then adding a dual port 10Gb SFP NIC in the PCIe slot it has. I'll be direct attaching each host to each SPF port on the Synology (each host has only one SFP port).
I was thinking of either using the 4 Samsung SM863 drives as read/write cache and then adding 4 spinner HDDs for VM storage OR adding 4 more SM863 SSDs and using only SSD storage for the VM storage.
I currently run 25 VMs which use about 1.5TB in space but with Starwinds Virtual SAN I use dedupe so it uses much less that that...maybe 800GB. Not sure if the Synology does dedupe.
So would this be a better choice for storage? I don't want to have a Linux/Windows SAN anymore. I just want something that I can forget about and it will run for months at a time and not need (frequent) updates, reboots etc.
I did consider VSAN with a Witness appliance but have yet to find an affordable cache tier SSD for lab use.
Is the Synology a good choice for what I want to achieve? Not sure how good the performance would be running the VMs off of HDDs with SSD read/write cache and if 8GB of memory in the unit would be enough?