With a hyperconverged setup, I have used crossover cables between two 10Gb NICs. If I have compute and storage separated, do I need to add redundant 10Gb switching? Or can I still get by with crossover cables (2 compute nodes, 2 storage nodes)?

Is it possible to use multiple SSD drives for L2 cache? For example, instead of purchasing a more expensive 1.6 TB Intel P3700, is it possible to purchase two 800 GB Intel S3700 SSDs and get 1.6TB of L2 cache that way?

If we consider an example of, say, needing 8 TB usable storage, and around 4000 IOPS, is it reasonable to use StarWind with a small number of NL SAS, and then add some L2 cache and use a decent size RAM cache? This is compared to, say, trying to cram 24x SAS drives into a chassis which does not make...

I understand that an LSFS volume will automatically shrink itself during maintenance when IO is low. Is this right? I have a 100 GB LSFS volume, and it is using 484 GB of disk space. There is no IO for about 12 hours, but the LSFS volume has not decreased in size. In fact it has increased a few GB u...

Thanks. Does it matter if the second StarWind datastore is under the same iSCSI target, or should it be separate? For example, right now I have Servers > HV1 > Storage1 > HAImage2. Should the new datastore be a second device under Storage1, or should there be a new Servers > HV1 > Storage2 > HAImage...

I have a 2-node hyperconverged Hyper-V/StarWind cluster. I have VMs running on both hosts. I believe StarWind V8 recommends configuring the storage as "fail over only" instead of "round robin", in order for the VM to make use of the local host's storage if possible. If this is co...

Those R720xd servers will work fine, if they meet your IOPS needs. I would not separate OS on dedicated drives. Just use a single RAID10. A separate RAID1 is just wasted disks. RAID0 should not be used with only two servers. Too risky if one of the servers is offline. Virtualization is not more risk...

In a multi-node configuration, does read cache and write buffer operate at the same IOPS as a RAM disk? I would think that read cache would operate at the speed of RAM disk because it does not need to sync to all nodes, but write buffer would not because it has to sync over the network to all nodes....

If you specify, say, 10 GB of RAM cache to a StarWind volume, how much L1 reach cache and how much write buffer do you end up with?

anton (staff) wrote:Unteam your NICs and use MPIO in Round-Robin mode. That's the way to go!

Why does the guide show to use failover only instead of round robin?

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/styles- ... manual.pdf

I read in another thread that in early fall 2014 there would be a feature to allow changing cache size. http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3548 Is this feature available yet (I can't find a way to do it)? If it's not available, is there a way to change the L1 cache size a...