Hi Clayton, Starwind already does that (multipathing active/active) - you just need the target & partner to be in sync. I'm sure that there are more performance improvements to come beyond the improvements to full sync that Anton was mentioning. Having said that, I was quite impressed recently w...

There are some things that can only be done by using VLANs. E.g say you are connecting two physical locations together over just one connection(or two for diversity), you can run multiple, logically seperate networks over that same connection using VLANs. Performance: in my experience there has been...

I thought you used SuperMicro chassis? Did you switch to something else. The SMicro expanders are LSI compatible No, still with Supermicro chassis and motherboards, and yes, all Supermicro SAS stuff these days is LSI based. One of the reasons I switched to LSI rather than stayed with Areca is that ...

Aitor, Curious why you are switching to the 9280 & not the Areca 1880x? On one of my two Starwind servers, both of which had 1680 cards, I ran into a situation where the server would not boot because the Areca wouldn't recognise the cards attached to it. Some of the time. Actually, most of the ...

Sure, if your access pattern is sequential then SSDs don't provide such a huge benefit. Having said that the 1680 is a bit limited by PCIe 1.0 - the mosty I could push was about 1GB/sec to cache. Of course, that's before iSCSI and Ethernet take their toll, but the 1880 (and LSI 9280, same ROC) can d...

A while back a project I was involved with discovered a bug in VSS which had to go back to Microsoft for a hotfix... this was in a non-iSCSI, non-clustered environment, but might also cause problems elsewhere. Basically each time a VSS snapshot was taken by a backup operation, the registry would gro...

Make sure you have a good winch to lift those servers into the racks - even with all the drives and PSUs removed, those chassis are going to be very heavy! Personally I would have gone for the Supermicro double sided chassis, and I think that where databases are concerned, SLC SSDs or even over prov...

I've never had this problem and I've been using R2 + CSV since it was released. Normally, there are only two reasons for a CSV going into redirected mode - iSCSI path failure of all paths on one hyper-v node, and doing a VSS based backup. On the Starwind side, I'm sure you've enabled cluster access ...

If you are looking at 600GB @ 15K then that probably means 3.5" drives, which I haven't costed - maybe the premium for them isn't so high as with 2.5". I tend to use 3.5" just for 2TB "big, slow and cheap" tier and 2.5" for everything else. Also the choice of SSDs that ...

Hi, I use Starwind as a SAN for a hyper-v cluster (I rent virtual machines), and although I don't have as many VMs as you, and am using a different hypervisor, have the same sort of issue as you in terms of needing to accomodate lots of VMs. I'm also in the middle of switching from Areca 1680ix-24 t...

As a follow up to your post, I am using dedicated iSCSI switches. To clarify your comment I don't need to use VLAN tagging at the StarWind and VM nics but should establish VLANs at the switch? Or do I just rely on the IP addressing to take care of the VLAN such as xxx.xxx.101.xxx for VLAN 1 and xxx...

hixont, thank you for your reply Constantin, I am confused to why you have this Technical Paper "StarWind iSCSI SAN Software: Implementing NIC Teaming on a StarWind Machine". When would nic teaming be used? AFAIK, the advice to team NICs was for the sync channel only, and I'm not sure if ...

Thanks Alex... So assuming I'm doing the sums correctly.... (I'm using 1TB = 1024 GB, 1GB = 1024 MB, 1MB = 1024 KB) fast sync write ops before hours before full sync Target size (bytes) log size (bytes) full sync necessarry 100 iops 1000 iops =========================================================...

Hi Alex, This was with V5.5 Build 20100831. The target was WT, not WB. And the node I wanted to sync from was in synchronised state. There would have been about 200GB difference between the nodes, as about 200GB was re-written every day; the target was being used for backups if several VMs. You say:...

Great looking specs for the Starwind boxes... however SSD for the OS is overkill - you don't need it for performance, as once booted, there will be very little i/o activity. But if you rationale is reliability (solid state vs mechanical) then go for it. Sandforce SSDs have been criticised a bit for ...