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Cheapest way of going virtual with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

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Very small shops and often hesitate to go virtual and stay on physical servers. Usually it's because they only have and need a single physical server. But when a disaster strikes and the server is down, then there is usually long time before the users can connect and work again. In this post we will explore a way of providing storage and compute redundancy with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN).

StarWind only needs two physical servers where other solutions usually have a physical shared storage as third physical “box” or uses 3 hosts to create storage pool. StarWind only needs two, because it uses an internal mechanism to sync data across those two nodes and don't need third host which usually act as Witness and runs a tiebreaker code.

StarWind for Hyper-V or VMware vSphere are two versions of StarWind where the vSphere edition now does not need Windows to run. You save some money on licensing. StarWind Virtual SAN is now distributed as a Linux VM (VSA) with pass-through disks, and pass-through NICs to achieve the best possible performance. The solution pulls the local storage of each host and creates a shared storage pool. 

If you're Hyper-V shop, you can setup a redundant cluster with just two Hyper-V hosts which fits in most scenarios for ROBO and very small SMB.

StarWind High Availability (HA) relies on redundant network links between the StarWind hosts to maintain storage resilience. Those links are used for monitoring and failures. If any of the nodes fail or stop processing requests properly, the failover is instantly initiated from the client OS/Hypervisor side.

StarWind VSAN Architecture compared to traditional 2-servers + shared storage.

StarWind VSAN architecture for small business running on VMware

So what would one actually need to run a small virtual infrastructure, to run a couple of virtual machines (VMs), and have one of the cheapest solutions with some kind of high availability? VMware vSphere has two editions for small business. It is vSphere Essentials (without automatic HA and restart of VMs) and Essentials plus license.

If you don't need to restart your VMs automatically, the vSphere Essentials is just fine. You'll be able to install the solution on just two servers (hosts) if you wish. You'll need to deploy a vCenter server for configuration, but if you only using two hosts, you can also jump into the host console and work on your VMs through just two web-based consoles.

If one of your hosts is down, simply register your VMs on the host which survived and start those VMs manually. There is no data loss as the underlying storage is mirrored by StarWind.

StarWind will be deployed as a virtual appliance (OVA) which can be downloaded from StarWind. However before you do that, make sure that you setup properly your underlying ESXi hosts with virtual networks and all this kind of stuff.

Note: You'll need at least 3 network interface cards (NICs) which StarWind will be using.

As for the storage, you should not only follow StarWind Best Practices but also get the latest version of VSAN software from StarWind.

StarWind Virtual SAN for VMware – What's New?

Core

  • Linux Kernel updated.
  • Fixed StarWind Events issue in Management Console, namely the invisibility of events after changing time in the OS.
  • Added support for iSCSI Header Digest and iSCSI Data Digest. These features provide CRC data control in iSCSI headers and PDUs, respectively, and can be enabled by setting corresponding options in iSCSI Initiator on the client.
  • Optimized performance when more than three sessions connect to the target.
  • Added log message for an error on session reinstantiation due to the stuck old session.
  • Fixed issue in cache deinitialization. In some cases, devices with disk cache could prevent normal service termination.

Here is the view from the management console, which must be installed on a Windows management workstation.

StarWind Management Console

The newest StarWind VSAN build can be downloaded here:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/download-starwind-products

The complete Release Notes can be viewed by following this link:
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/release-notes-build

Final Words

StarWind Virtual SAN will make sure that your shared storage will available for VMs if any of your hosts will fail. The minimum number of hosts is two where most of its competitors needs 3 hosts. StarWind has an internal heartbeat mechanism which ensures proper storage path isolation in the event of synchronization network failures and prevents so-called storage “split-brain”.

So the solution is a perfect fit for ROBO and SMB where coupled with vSphere Essentials or Essentials plus license, you get a very resilient platform for a reasonable cost without investing into an additional hardware SAN device.

More posts about StarWind on ESX Virtualization:

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About Vladan SEGET

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Comments

  1. Tom says

    Three NIC cards or three NIC ports??
    The distinction is significant. 🙂
    Please try to be more specific.

  2. Lukasz says

    Have you ever heard about StorMagic? Maybe some comparerism? For me StorMagic is having also vCenter plugin which is very useful. Beside that they look quite similar. Wondering about price difference.

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