When one of my servers came back from repair (finally, after about 2 months!) a 2TB target that I had needed a full sync, although normally a fast sync is OK. I think I've seen elsewhere on the board that if there's an outage for a long time and/or a lot of data changes on the surviving node, fast s...

Is there anyway to verify MPIO installed correctly? I remember enabling it and then having to reboot. Yes. There's 2 things you need to do. On each Hyper-v server, open the MPIO control panel from Administrative Tools. On the first tab, you should see a list of MPIO devices, one of them should be t...

Hi, Those MD1000 results are actually a bit disappointing - unless maybe it's with a PERC 5e (my retired 2950 came with a 5i, and it's not as fast as a 6i). And it's weird that you getting faster writes than reads! With read speed, given that RAID 5 reads should perform similar to RAID 0 reads, at l...

On the Hyper-v servers, you need to make sure that they are set up to have a connection to both Starwind boxes, for each target. If you stick with default names, for each HA target, there will be two targets listed in MS iSCSI initiator - xyx and xyz partner. You also need to make sure that multipat...

I can't actually try this as the moment as one of my servers is out for repair. Anyway, I've had this idea... Currently, you can't have an HA target that uses a RAM disk, and write performance of the Write Back cache is held back a bit by writes not being acknowledged until both nodes have written t...

Hi, I assume that the T710s are new, but that you've already got the MD1000's and the Perc 6e, as if you were buying new you'd probably go for the newer SAS 2 stuff. The T710 is a fantastic server, I've used it for a client in a SAN-less hyper-v deployment, and now that Dell backtracked from their s...

I'm not convinced that iperf and hyper-v play nicely together. I would get different results each test, going from mediocre to abysmal and always consistently lower than I was seeing in more real-world tests (e.g. running tests against iSCSI targets, doing network copies etc). This was with 10Gbit/s...

Do you think we have to go for iSCSI USB storage? You can already do that! Although I wouldn't recommend anyone keep a SAN target on a USB drive... I was going to suggest a DHTML version of the management console, but I can't really see a pressing need for it as you can get an RDP client for almost...

Many thanks! 5.5 beta is looking really good, and I'm really looking forward to putting the release version through its paces.

If you keep giving away iPads, sooner or later someone will be asking you to write apps for it... do you think Steve Jobs will allow a SAN monitoring app?

Damir, the beta has everything, but obviously features, functionality and performance can change between beta and release. I'm not sure if I understand what you want to do correctly, but at the moment I don't know a way to do it without some downtime. For a non-ha or ha img target, if you wanted to ...

Take a look at the 5.5 beta. It can auto-resync any HA target, most of the time. If you use no cache, or Write Through cache, then it will auto-resync using fast sync, where just the changes since the outage get copied over. Write Back needs a full sync which takes longer. In my tests it's been pret...

Hi Matt, you don't say which version of Starwind you are using. I'm on the latest beta of 5.5(and using it in what I will call semi-production until it's released) - so our experiences may be different. A full sync copies the entire img, doesn't matter if it's mostly empty, and 600GB over 1GbitE sho...

Here are some results from within a VM, testing an HA target with WB cache. The path is like this Windows (SBS 2008) running on a Hyper-V cluster VHD on CSV on starwind target single 10GbE port on hyper-v cluster node path 1: 10GbE switch, 10GbE to starwind 1 path 2: 10GbE switch, 1GbE to another sw...

I would say that SSD is overkill for a server boot disk. You shouldn't be rebooting it very often, and the boot disk of a Starwind server (assuming targets are on other disks) doesn't get worked very hard, so SSD doesn't give you much advantage. You could spend the money saved on more RAM, faster CP...

Another way to test the sync network performance is to set up a RAM disk target on one node and benchmark it from the other. I was struggling to beat 60% of 10GbE until I did this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/winserverperformance/archive/2010/02/02/increase-vmbus-buffer-sizes-to-increase-network-thro...