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StarWind
- Thread starter USMCGrunt
- Start date
we frequently use it to build prototypes for our numerous robo locations but never had put it into production (like any other software defined storage including vmware vsan so starwind is of no exception)
recent starwind virtual san v8 with a massive scale out, flash cache and log-structuring is nice but again for robo and lab deployment we never really wrapped anything bigger then their basic 2- or 3-node setup
good reading about both vmware and starwind vsans here:
http://thenicholson.com/software-storage-far-less-riskey-buisness/
recent starwind virtual san v8 with a massive scale out, flash cache and log-structuring is nice but again for robo and lab deployment we never really wrapped anything bigger then their basic 2- or 3-node setup
good reading about both vmware and starwind vsans here:
http://thenicholson.com/software-storage-far-less-riskey-buisness/
Child of Wonder
2[H]4U
- Joined
- May 22, 2006
- Messages
- 3,270
Starwind is a good product but also has some weird bugs. I participated on the v8 beta program and there were some serious flaws in the product that would cause LUNs to go down. I can only assume they've been corrected.
I did a fair amount of performance testing with their thin LSFS LUNs and wasn't pleased with their performance. I saw more disk latency and slower IO bandwidth than with a legacy thick image file LUN.
Still, it's a much better iSCSI target than the one that comes with Windows and is one of the best software iSCSI targets out there. Just don't expect great performance with it.
I did a fair amount of performance testing with their thin LSFS LUNs and wasn't pleased with their performance. I saw more disk latency and slower IO bandwidth than with a legacy thick image file LUN.
Still, it's a much better iSCSI target than the one that comes with Windows and is one of the best software iSCSI targets out there. Just don't expect great performance with it.
Yes we used it for a couple of years before finally purchasing a real SAN.
It has its ups and downs. What are your questions?
*edit* Oh yea, Semper Fi!
Just curious on the overall feel is for their product. Does it live up to the marketing, is it a legitimate alternative to entry level VM setups that can't afford a real SAN setup, etc...
We used version 6, not the latest one they are testing for release now, and the product was very stable. Wasn't as fast as we would have liked, we backed it with SSDs and 15k drives, was fast enough to run 50-60 VM's on a 2 node Hyper-V cluster. Main issue was inconsistency and the amount of time a resync took. If you had to update one node, when it restarted it would kick off a resync of the data and a 1tb volume took hours. You had to wait until the resync was done before you could update the other node.
Deduplication is not even worth discussing in Starwind and to be honest they should remove it from their website. It has so many issues I don't know why they even include it in marketing material and the official status from support is to not use it for production.....
All in all for the price though it was a good product. We just wanted more and were willing to pay for it.
Deduplication is not even worth discussing in Starwind and to be honest they should remove it from their website. It has so many issues I don't know why they even include it in marketing material and the official status from support is to not use it for production.....
All in all for the price though it was a good product. We just wanted more and were willing to pay for it.
Still, it's a much better iSCSI target than the one that comes with Windows and is one of the best software iSCSI targets out there. Just don't expect great performance with it.
Not to derail this thread, but did you try Windows Server 2012 iSCSI? They have done a great job with it imho, I have been running 8 LUNs on it since R2 came out and it's been rock solid. These aren't production LUNs but lab LUNs for classroom instruction, but it was very set up and forget without any LUNs being dropped or any other issues.
Simple, integrated, and reliable. Recommended.
v8 is a totally different beast compared to v6 (btw anybody knows what happened to v7?) as everything has changed including core and gui (this actually sucks as most of the docs refer to v6)
with v8 old deduplication engine coming with v6 was dropped and replaced with lsfslsfs which is very similar to what nimble has (casl) and netapp has (wafl) from my understanding
basically now starwind dedupe plays nice where msft dedupe fails and this scenario is write intensive workloads (thanks to elden christiansen from msft who finally told on a last teched what "vdi" for msft really is) and starwind indeed can boost iops and save expensive flash space (no point in using dedupe with sata spindles the same as with msft dedupe however)
with v8 old deduplication engine coming with v6 was dropped and replaced with lsfslsfs which is very similar to what nimble has (casl) and netapp has (wafl) from my understanding
basically now starwind dedupe plays nice where msft dedupe fails and this scenario is write intensive workloads (thanks to elden christiansen from msft who finally told on a last teched what "vdi" for msft really is) and starwind indeed can boost iops and save expensive flash space (no point in using dedupe with sata spindles the same as with msft dedupe however)
We used version 6, not the latest one they are testing for release now, and the product was very stable. Wasn't as fast as we would have liked, we backed it with SSDs and 15k drives, was fast enough to run 50-60 VM's on a 2 node Hyper-V cluster. Main issue was inconsistency and the amount of time a resync took. If you had to update one node, when it restarted it would kick off a resync of the data and a 1tb volume took hours. You had to wait until the resync was done before you could update the other node.
Deduplication is not even worth discussing in Starwind and to be honest they should remove it from their website. It has so many issues I don't know why they even include it in marketing material and the official status from support is to not use it for production.....
All in all for the price though it was a good product. We just wanted more and were willing to pay for it.
windows iscsi target is a dead cow and it's the way msft sees it
smb3 is a future of an msft storage (tons of reasons why) so use it
starwind works in a loopback (iscsi is used only to establish a connection similar things are dome with msft when they go tcp -> rdma with smb3) or over smb3 providing a block back end of a scale out file servers (sofa), iscsi is kept for internal housekeeping only (like old vmware vsa did expose nfs and used iscsi inside for block storage and inernode communications)
smb3 is a future of an msft storage (tons of reasons why) so use it
starwind works in a loopback (iscsi is used only to establish a connection similar things are dome with msft when they go tcp -> rdma with smb3) or over smb3 providing a block back end of a scale out file servers (sofa), iscsi is kept for internal housekeeping only (like old vmware vsa did expose nfs and used iscsi inside for block storage and inernode communications)
Not to derail this thread, but did you try Windows Server 2012 iSCSI? They have done a great job with it imho, I have been running 8 LUNs on it since R2 came out and it's been rock solid. These aren't production LUNs but lab LUNs for classroom instruction, but it was very set up and forget without any LUNs being dropped or any other issues.
Simple, integrated, and reliable. Recommended.