Correction here: StarWind VSAN is VM based only when talking about the VMware. In case of Hyper-V StarWind runs on physical partition.
HCI Servers Build... Starwind VSAN or VMWare vSAN?
- Thread starter phennexion
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If I was Hyper-V I might consider trying out StarWind, but I'm not interested in moving away from ESXi at this point. So I'll have to give VSAN a try...once the budget is available to do so. Hopefully by summer budget will free up so I can go purchase enough enterprise SSDs to give it a fair shake.
There is no way of going with VMware vSAN using only two nodes (like SW does) which was a showstopper for us (a couple of branches needed to be virtualized with minimal footprint and budget) since vSAN still needs a witness that has to be a third physical host.
I've been doing some benchmarking much like dwright1542 and figured out that VMware iSCSI initiator seems to be CPU-bound sitting on a single core. As soon as you start loading it with low-latency high-IOPS storage operations it bottlenecks the CPU core and stays there making it impossible to squeeze out maximum your storage can provide.
I've been doing some benchmarking much like dwright1542 and figured out that VMware iSCSI initiator seems to be CPU-bound sitting on a single core. As soon as you start loading it with low-latency high-IOPS storage operations it bottlenecks the CPU core and stays there making it impossible to squeeze out maximum your storage can provide.
I am running a StarWind vSAN on my 2 node server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster right now.
have been running it for just over a year. works nice.
I have similar needs as OP, we only have 2 servers, and no budget for more (heck, it have been a chore to get the PTB to buy this 2, only managed because the old server give up in mid stride and we had to run all on an even older SQL server machine).
so as it been, got first node DELL PE 730dx and load it up with Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V
load the Starwind on it and setup 3 shares CVS1 / CVS2 and Witness.
same on second.
added the cluster role and and build out the cluster.
CSV1 is no node 1, csv2 is on node 2 (actually all of the shares are on all nodes but each has a primary node selected )
performance is not an issue for me though.
have been running it for just over a year. works nice.
I have similar needs as OP, we only have 2 servers, and no budget for more (heck, it have been a chore to get the PTB to buy this 2, only managed because the old server give up in mid stride and we had to run all on an even older SQL server machine).
so as it been, got first node DELL PE 730dx and load it up with Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V
load the Starwind on it and setup 3 shares CVS1 / CVS2 and Witness.
same on second.
added the cluster role and and build out the cluster.
CSV1 is no node 1, csv2 is on node 2 (actually all of the shares are on all nodes but each has a primary node selected )
performance is not an issue for me though.
No problem, did that for a while. Acceptable latency has even increased in the newer releases.
Some caveats apply when the remote connection establishing unit (firewall/vpn) runs on the vSan datastore (if you reboot the two nodes and loose vsan you will not be able to re-establish without the vpn).
this is a good point. a setup i inherited had this issue (i didnt catch it until...outage!).
cheap/quick fix was to a add 2x 60$ or so mikrotiks to handle the site to site VPN. (+ we were able to use a non encrypted gre tunnel as both sites at private fiber linking them, but did end up adding HW ipsec to the tunnel later on). not bad for > 150$ all in, secure vpn/tunnel.