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Exploring StarWind VSAN: High Availability, Cost Savings, and Performance

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Today, businesses are constantly seeking solutions that offer high availability (HA), cost savings, and exceptional performance. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is a software-defined storage solution that addresses these needs by eliminating the requirement for physical shared storage. Let’s dive into the key features and benefits of StarWind VSAN, and explore the hypervisor platforms it supports.

StarWind VSAN is particularly well-suited for Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) environments due to its cost-efficiency, flexibility, and ease of deployment. By eliminating the need for costly shared storage and allowing the use of existing hardware, StarWind VSAN significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for ROBO setups.

Its ability to create a fully-fledged virtual storage pool from internal server resources (you are using the local disks in each server and create a mirror) ensures high availability and performance, even in remote locations. Additionally, the lack of a strict hardware compatibility list (HCL) means that businesses can use a wide range of hardware, further enhancing flexibility and reducing costs. This makes StarWind VSAN an ideal solution for businesses looking to maintain robust IT infrastructure across multiple locations without breaking the bank

Key Features of StarWind VSAN

High Availability (HA) – StarWind VSAN ensures high availability by synchronously replicating data between nodes. This means that in the event of a hardware failure, your data remains accessible, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity1. The fault tolerance provided by StarWind VSAN is crucial for mission-critical applications.

Cost Savings – One of the standout benefits of StarWind VSAN is its ability to deliver significant cost savings. By leveraging existing hardware and eliminating the need for dedicated SAN hardware, businesses can reduce their capital expenditures. Additionally, StarWind VSAN allows for the reuse of software licenses and supports a “Bring Your Own Hardware” approach. This flexibility makes it an attractive option for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking to optimize their IT budgets.

Performance – StarWind VSAN is designed to maximize performance by utilizing features such as data locality, which keeps compute and storage resources for each virtual machine on its physical node. This approach reduces latency and improves overall system performance. The integration with NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) further enhances performance by allowing maximum PCIe SSD utilization in Hyper-V environments.

Supported Hypervisor Platforms

StarWind VSAN is compatible with a variety of hypervisor platforms, making it a versatile solution for different IT environments. The supported hypervisors include:

  • Microsoft Hyper-V4
  • VMware vSphere/ESXi
  • Linux KVM
  • Xen

Screenshot from the lab showing synchronization between nodes

VAAI Support – If you're running VMware in your datacenter, you might want to know that StarWind VSAN has a VAAI support that allows StarWind to offload multiple storage operations from the VMware hosts to the storage array itself. Thus, these operations are carried out much faster and with no impact on the system’s performance.

Screenshot from the lab showing hardware acceleration support via VAAI. StarWind datastore with VAAI support.

Quote from VMware (link):

VMware vSphere® Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), also referred to as hardware acceleration or hardware offload APIs, are a set of APIs to enable communication between VMware vSphere ESXi™ hosts and storage devices. The APIs define a set of “storage primitives” that enable the ESXi host to offload certain storage operations to the array, which reduces resource overhead on the ESXi hosts and can significantly improve performance for storage-intensive operations such as storage cloning, zeroing, and so on. The goal of VAAI is to help storage vendors provide hardware assistance to speed up VMware® I/O operations that are more efficiently accomplished in the storage hardware.

Without the use of VAAI, cloning or migration of virtual machines by the vSphere VMkernel Data Mover involves software data movement. The Data Mover issues I/O to read and write blocks to and from the source and destination datastores. With VAAI, the Data Mover can use the API primitives to offload operations to the array if possible. For example, if the desired operation were to copy a virtual machine disk (VMDK) file from one datastore to another inside the same array, the array would be directed to make the copy completely inside the array. Whenever a data movement operation is invoked and the corresponding hardware offload operation is enabled, the Data Mover will first attempt to use the hardware offload. If the hardware offload operation fails, the Data Mover reverts to the traditional software method of data movement.

In nearly all cases, hardware data movement will perform significantly better than software data movement. It will consume fewer CPU cycles and less bandwidth on the storage fabric. Improvements in performance can be observed by timing operations that use the VAAI primitives and using esxtop to track values such as CMDS/s, READS/s, WRITES/s, MBREAD/s, and MBWRTN/s of storage adapters during the operation.

This broad compatibility ensures that businesses can seamlessly integrate StarWind VSAN into their existing infrastructure, regardless of the hypervisor they are using.

Note: you can also configure file shares on StarWind VSAN. There is a blog post on how-to do it at StarWind here.

Pre-Configured Appliances

For businesses looking for a turnkey solution, StarWind offers pre-configured appliances with VSAN already set up. These appliances, known as StarWind HyperConverged Appliances (HCA), come pre-built, pre-configured, and pre-tested. They combine best-of-breed hardware and software components, including Dell servers, Intel flash, and VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, all powered by StarWind Virtual SAN. This option provides a hassle-free deployment experience and ensures optimal performance and reliability.

StarWind Support

StarWind offers comprehensive support plans to ensure your systems run smoothly and efficiently. They provide three levels of support: Standard, Premium, and ProActive Premium. Each plan includes unlimited support tickets and access to support via email, phone, SSH, and Zoom remote sessions. The ProActive Premium plan stands out with its AI-powered telemetry and automatic issue detection, which can resolve up to 90% of issues without customer intervention. This proactive approach ensures minimal downtime and optimal performance for your infrastructure.

Final Words

StarWind VSAN offers a compelling combination of high availability, cost savings, and performance, making it an ideal choice for businesses looking to modernize their storage infrastructure. With support for multiple hypervisor platforms, it provides the flexibility and scalability needed to meet the demands of today’s dynamic IT environments.

Link: StarWind VSAN

More posts about StarWind on ESX Virtualization:

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About Vladan SEGET

This website is maintained by Vladan SEGET. Vladan is as an Independent consultant, professional blogger, vExpert x16, Veeam Vanguard x9, VCAP-DCA/DCD, ESX Virtualization site has started as a simple bookmarking site, but quickly found a large following of readers and subscribers.

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