Newbie Question

gmonk · Tue Aug 22, 2017 4:24 pm

Greetings,

Trying to gauge whether Star Winds is the right fit for my scenario. Four total nodes two in location A and two in location B. Locations A/B are seperated by 10GB switch to switch fiber connection.

All nodes have only 4 x 1GB nics connected to each switch at each location. My idea would bet to have a hyperconverged cluster between both nodes at each location housing the Virtual Machines with async replication between site A and site B in case site A dies VM's would spin up on site B and when site A comes back online everthing would revert back to site A. My only worry is these virtual machines would also include a domain controller and from what I have read a domain controller is needed to actually set everything up and Im not sure that 1GB nics would be adequate.

Thanks for your time

epalombizio · Tue Aug 22, 2017 8:40 pm

Hi there,
Regarding the requirement of a DC, are you using Hyper-V or VMWARE as your hypervisor. There is definitely no requirement for a DC if you are using the latter.

With respect to the 4 1GB NICs, this will all depend on your load, but considering 10GB pricing has come down considerably, I'd opt for that to help future-proof the solution.

I can't speak to Async replication as I'm not using it. I use Veeam to handle replication of VMs and it works very well for this use case. I would opt to keep DCs up in the other location if possible to help mitigate login issues if you have the licenses available.

E

Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:09 pm

Hello epalombizio,
Thank you for your answer and correct questions,

Hello Monk,
Thank you for your interest in StarWind solution.
Asynchronous replication (or Active-Passive scenario) is used for disaster recovery while synchronous replication (or Active-Active scenario) makes highly-available storage. Please, note, if you are considering Asynchronous replication (or Active-Passive scenario) the data on Async (passive) site will be in read-only mode. So, you need to mount the disk manually to restore VM on async site.

Please let us know if you have other questions.