I can confirm that Starwind works with CSV. As far as I know, there are no special requirements for CSV storage beyond the normal cluster requirements (e.g. iSCSI must support persistent reservations, which Starwind does.) I've tested a cluster of Windows 2008 R2 (Release Candidate) Hyper-V nodes us...

Lionel, I think this is by design. assuming that in Starwind you enabled clustering when you created the targets, your Hyper-V nodes are what's doing the reservation. In MIcrosoft clustering, only one node at a time can own a disk resource, so you should find that one node has the disk online and th...

At least you can be encouraged by the fact that it's been done before. On Windows. Maybe not for an iSCSI target but... Many moons ago I had the misfortune to have to buy an EMC CX300 SAN for my company (long story, won't go into that). This was a fiber channel drive array with dual controllers, eac...

Mike, To RAID 1 mirroring in Windows, you need to use dynamic disks. Unfortunately you can't use iSCSI based volumes as dynamic disks. However, in theory you could use Hyper-V (or some other virtualisation technology) to virtualise the iSCSI volumes, so that Windows running in a VM can treat them as...

Minor correction: network copys on the starwind box can also cause the problem. Basically avoid any heavy i/o on a starwind box that isn't itself going through Starwind, and that means via an inititator to a stawind target (as zeroing out an img can also cause the problem). I think this is because W...

I'd like to see how you handle write cacheing in combination with HA. Basically, I would want a way to force both synchronous replication and cache mirroring. The overall objective is that if an initiator issues a write command, it's not notified that the write is committed until both starwind boxes...

I have been using a combination of NIC teaming and MPIO, although I would prefer not to. My set up: Hyper-V nodes (Windows 2008 Datacenter) 1x 10GbE, 2x 1GbE, all Intel running ProSet drivers Starwind server: 2x 10GbE, Intel ProSet Switches: Two switches with 24x 1GbE and 4x 10GbE each. Each Hyper-v...

More updates; - a complete reboot of the Starwind box didn't cure the problem - problem seems to only arise when foreground i/o is happening on the starwind box. So, creating a new img that is zeroed out, using windows explorer to move an img - these actions can cause the problem. It doesn't seem to...

As another experiment, I'm trying to cause the activity within Starwind. Instead of moving the .img, I'm creating a new one, with the fill with zeroes option to cause the disk activity. This causes the same problem - delayed write errors in all windows 2003 VMs, even when they are not running off th...

Hi, Short: I think this is more a problem with Windows 2003, but could perhaps be addressed by a new feature in Starwind Long: I'm using Starwind as iSCSI storage for a Windows 2008 cluster running Hyper-V. On this cluster there are a number of virtual machines, mostly Windows 2008 and Windows 2003....

AL, Starwind keeps its config in an xml file in the install directory, called starwind.cfg by default. Perhaps you could automate the creation of that file? E.g. rollout your starwind servers with the service disabled, generate the config files, then start the starwind service up... Here's a snippet...

That's fantastic news. Being able to build your own no-single-point-of-failure SAN will really shake up the storage market. With starwind today I can build a SAN array that is cheaper, faster, and has more useful features and fewer restrictions than a low end box like a Dell MD3000i. The lack of ful...

Are there any new HA features? I'm hoping for automatic failover & failback between Starwind instances (that are using continous replication to keep in sync). I think the extra cost (second server, license, disks) will still be cheaper than most MSCS based solutions, as the cost of shared storag...