Starwind on Active Directory

mgh · Thu Jan 13, 2011 4:20 pm

Hello,
i have a few question regarding the installation of starwind :

1 : is there any issue installing starwind on a windows 2008 R2 with AD role ?
2 : the server will also be used with backup exec or any other backup software. no compatibility issue ?
3 : is the Starwind Entreprise cdp edition MPIO capable ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Aitor_Ibarra · Thu Jan 13, 2011 4:45 pm

1) You really shouldn't do this - it's nearly always best to keep AD servers as dedicated for that purpopse and that purpose only. Sure, it's possible to combine AD with other roles (and in MS Small Business Server - which is IMHO a great product - it's combined with Exchange!) but think about it - do you really want your domain AND your SAN to be down at the same time? Especially don't do this if this is your only domain controller. If you are hardware limited, stick the DC into a dedicated VM.

2) As a backup guest, I doubt there will be a problem - anything that can back up NTFS volumes using VSS should be able to backup Starwind, but as a backup server - don't do this if you also want to sustain high i/o to your starwind targets - unless you have lots of disk and network bandwidth. Again, I would move the backup server into a VM. ANd don't have it contend with Starwind for physical disks.

3) AFAIK all editions of Starwind support multiple paths to the same target - not sure if that's MPIO (as in 5.x HA) or MCS (4.2). So even if you don't have HA, you could have multiple NICs in your Starwind server and therefore have multiple network paths between initiator and target - so you can survive a NIC or switch failure - and you can do this without NIC teaming.

Thu Jan 13, 2011 4:50 pm

1) No issue! It's recommended to keep StarWind-running machine performing SAN server role exclusively. Reason is simple: RAM used to cache I/O... It's not a problem however to make StarWind co-exist with virtually any software. Question of CPU cycles (and resulting performance) only.

2) No known issues as well. Again, delayes could happen if backup software is touching StarWind-owned virtual disk images but it's entirely user response time impacted, nothing else.

3) Yes, MPIO is definitely OK. You'd better describe your scenario in details however... Just to be 200% sure

Thu Jan 13, 2011 4:51 pm

Wow! Absolutely love Aitor! Now customer has two answers and knows both sides of the story - insider's and outsider's

Aitor_Ibarra · Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:02 pm

That's quite funny!

I guess then the answer to 1) and 2) is yes you can if you really want to - at least we agree on that!

The reason why I say keep AD and SAN on seperate Windows instances is from experience... Both pieces tend to be mission critical to a network, so you really don't want to be doing maintenance on both at the same time! I know from bitter experience what happens to Microsoft clusters if the DC with the PDC emulator FMSO role is down for a few hours... So I would definitely keep them seperate. You should keep your DCs as pure as possible I have no problem combining the roles on the same hardware, in different VMs though.

Backup can be disk intensive, so just make sure it has its own spindles...

mooseracing · Thu Jan 13, 2011 6:42 pm

Aitor_Ibarra wrote:
Backup can be disk intensive, so just make sure it has its own spindles...

I would agree with this as well, in our scenario we had to move it to a dedicated server as the partner was just too overload from the backups and were were losing HA sync.

mgh · Fri Jan 14, 2011 9:34 am

Thank you for your answers.

Let me explain you my scenario :

1 ESXi4.1 server. 3 VMs. 1 of this 3 VMs will also have Active Directory role.
1 Win 2008 server with starwind to create the iscsi target. 12 * 3'5 HDD. ESXi Datastore. AD role too (for having a physical AD and AD "failover")
Also on this starwind server, i want to put our tape drive, because it seems easier to have it on a physical server than in a virtual one
(compatibilty issue with Esxi 4.1\VmDirectpath ?) The backup will be done during the night, so it's not important if there is performance issue.

The aim is also to have the lowest numbers of server active.

What do you think about it ?

Sat Jan 15, 2011 7:40 pm

Should work fine. And you can use Tape Redirector or extra StarWind to redirect physical tape inside virtual machine thru iSCSI. Tiny hint

mgh wrote:Thank you for your answers.

Let me explain you my scenario :

1 ESXi4.1 server. 3 VMs. 1 of this 3 VMs will also have Active Directory role.
1 Win 2008 server with starwind to create the iscsi target. 12 * 3'5 HDD. ESXi Datastore. AD role too (for having a physical AD and AD "failover")
Also on this starwind server, i want to put our tape drive, because it seems easier to have it on a physical server than in a virtual one
(compatibilty issue with Esxi 4.1\VmDirectpath ?) The backup will be done during the night, so it's not important if there is performance issue.

The aim is also to have the lowest numbers of server active.

What do you think about it ?