I need a SAN...or vSAN..or Shared Storage...or....WTF is this so complex?

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kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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it is Storage Software. that is OK. it itself is not a virtualized component.

Chris
"Storage software" capable of saturating a 40gbps link will consume a non-trivial amount of resources. Isn't that gonna throw off the hypervisor metrics/scheduling/contention handling?
 

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
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That is true. which is why you need to configure the hardware to allow maximum throughput. also you need to think about using QOS on the storage side.

you can use StarWind and S2D and ScaleIO as disparate storage. or you can use it as a Hyper Converged setup (along with vSAN). There are more things to think about a Hyper- converged setup. You have to think about the whole picture.

Chris
 

NISMO1968

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Oct 19, 2013
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San Antonio, TX
www.vmware.com
All listed are good solutions/options. Datacenter licensing isn't a big deal if you run hyperconverged, but for storage-only S2D is overpriced. StarWind has free version, but it comes w/out UI (PowerShell mgmt isn't for everybody) and w/out guaranteed support (which is understandable). VMware VSAN like S2D is nice for HCI but is kind kind of limited for storage-only. It has now iSCSI, but not very good one, and you have to bolt-on NFS & SMB3 to it.

The title is a bit misleading, it's not that I don't know the differences, but I'm at a point where I need additional thoughts, and I needed to get your attention... :)

Anyway, I'm in the planning stages of a production (for my own, not for a client) build, where I need "storage". My criteria (in no particular order) are:
- Highly available. Must survive _______ (Fill in the blank)
- Fast. Not blazingly fast (like @Patrick does with his Optane and what not), but enough to host database(s) among other things.
- Redundant (goes with #1, HA).

I have enough hardware (chassis, motherboards, CPUs memory etc) to put something(s) together, but...the million $$$ question in the end is...actually I'm not even sure. Hear me out.

The primary purpose of this "storage" is to host VMs, database(s) (the OLTP kind), and digital assets (files). Simple enough? My baseline is to saturate at least a 40gb connection, if not more. The main "storage" will be all flash/SSD, with a second tier of spinners, with a third tier of offsite backup/Disaster recovery. The "compute" side of things will probably end up being 6-10 eight core servers that are accessing this storage over 10gbps each.

I can go out and buy a SAN, but...scalability is a bit of an issue with SANs, so is performance, so is redundancy, and so is cost.

After countless hours of analysis/paralysis, I'm leaning towards Starwinds vSAN using Hyper-V as the hypervisor. If Vmware vSAN licensing was not so expensive, or if Storage Spaces Direct did not require a Datacenter license, I'd have considered both of those as well.

I'm not wedded to any particular virtualization environment per se, and can easily pick whatever makes sense.

What would you do?
 

kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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What's funny, in-VM is the only approach they do on VMware. I'm curious why did they decide to to "native" on Hyper-V, but run inside a VM on VMware?
I can answer that part...probably. The VMW storage APIs are "controlled/licensed" and Starwind would be direct competetion with VMW's vSAN, hence no cooperation from VMW.

Microsoft didn't have an equivalent solution until S2D... and even with that, the storage API is not licensed.
 

LaMerk

Member
Jun 13, 2017
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you can use StarWind and S2D and ScaleIO as disparate storage. or you can use it as a Hyper Converged setup (along with vSAN). There are more things to think about a Hyper- converged setup. You have to think about the whole picture.

Chris
Here is interesting blog where mentioned solutions are described in very expressive manner: BLOG - Blog

@kapone, If you have Windows datacenter edition, you can try S2D as an option.
 

kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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Did a fair amount of testing with Starwind, Server 2016 (Both standard and DC editions), and I'm not convinced this is the right approach.

For one, using ReFS has an impact on performance and I do want to use it (if using this platform vs ZFS). Secondly, I could not get any stats/benchmarks/numbers from Starwind as to how much CPU/RAM will it consume on the host side in this scenario. They kept dodging the question.

So...other options are Vmware VSAN (which I'm still gonna test), and.....what? Spinning up ZFS on a single host is easy as pie, and it will probably do the performance I'm looking for, but what about high availability and failover? That's not that straightforward with ZFS implementations.