StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far)
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basically we are having a time warp discussion back to 2007 when almost everyone truly believed that SANs actually were magic and did things that could not be explained or done without the label "SAN" involved and that physics or logic didn't apply. But in 2007, it was considered normal to think of a SAN as being magic. In the twelve years since, this same discussion has been had hundreds or thousands of times. The basics haven't changed. But finally people have started to realize that SANs are not magic at all, but just a server with drives in it, often doing an awful job with high failure rates and ridiculous costs. The world has moved on and nearly everyone understands this now. But this discussion is going right back to 2007 and acting as if SANs were still believed to be magic and that over a decade of general storage understanding hasn't happened.
I get it, storage can be confusing. But arguing against 15+ years of information that is well established and just acting like it hasn't happened and just reiterating the myths that have been solidly debunked and ignoring that this is all well covered ground just makes it seem crazy.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Right, but we aren't talking about not sharing it. So, again, you are talking about something different. I'm not sure where you are getting lost, but you are talking about totally different things than everyone else. This has nothing to do with the discussion here.
Good, then we are at least partially on the same page
Again, didn't scale for you, but your failures do not extend to everyone else. I'm not sure why you feel it can't scale, but it does successfully for others. The common factor here is "your attempts have failed". You have to stop looking at that as a guide to what "can't be done."
OK, what is the largest cluster size you can run with this starwind solution reliably? Their best practice doc is very careful about mentioning scale being a problem, although they call it "inconveniences".
Again... you are not understanding that because something can be bad doesn't mean it is always bad. This are basic logical constructs. You are missing the basic logic that absolutely no amount of observation of failures makes other people's observations of success impossible.
I am talking about a very basic thing - storage tasks require resources. Those resources need to come from somewhere. If you don't use dedicated boxes, you have to take resources away from your VMs. It is extremely simple.
You are assuming automated rebalance.
Automated or manually triggered - it's a costly operation. Even if you don't run a sync cycle but do a dumb data stream from a quiesced source, you will be pushing lots of data over several layers of hardware and protocol, that does not come for free. When you replace a disk in a RAID array, you are going to suffer from performance degradation until the raid is in sync, because the hardware or software raid system will be working hard to push all the missing data to the new disk in the best case scenario, and will be generating a ton of parity and hashes in the worst. This does not come cheap.
So you don't understand the pool risks and think that node risks alone exist and that the system as a whole carries no risks? This would explain a lot of the misconceptions around HC. The cluster itself carries risks, it's a single pool of software. Every platform vendor will tell you the same.
I understand the risks, and losing just a storage node or just a hypervisor node is much less risk than losing both at once. I was hoping you would understand that, but I guess I shouldn't hope.
Actually, that breaks the laws of physics. So obviously not true. SAN can't match speed or reliability of non-SAN. That's pure physics. You can't break the laws of math or physicals just by saying so.
Really? FC at lightspeed from a couple of yards away is significantly slower than local disk traffic? Are you sure we have the same physics in mind?
HC has EVERY possible advantage of SAN by definition, it just has to there is no way around it, but adds the advantages of reduction in risk points and adds the option of storage locality. Basic logic proves that HC has to be superior. You are constantly arguing demonstrably impossible "facts" as the bases for your conclucsions. But everyone knows that that's impossible.
You keep talking about your assumptions as if they are the one and only possible truth. They are not. HC cannot have the advantages of a SAN because the SAN is more than just a big JBOD (and even if it were, it has the advantage of being a much larger JBOD than you could ever hope to build on a single commodity server). A SAN has tons of added functionality which it deals with without loading the hosts. If you start implementing all of that in HC, you end up spending even more local host resources on non-workload needs. So either your "basic logic" is flawed, or you simply aren't able to accept that there might be points of view besides yours.
basically we are having a time warp discussion back to 2007 when almost everyone truly believed that SANs actually were magic and did things that could not be explained or done without the label "SAN" involved and that physics or logic didn't apply.
I'm not the one talking about "magic sauce" here, remember? I am actually talking about implementation specifics and how they are not simple (because I know these details and technologies well enough to discuss them and see no magic in them)
I get it, storage can be confusing. But arguing against 15+ years of information that is well established and just acting like it hasn't happened and just reiterating the myths that have been solidly debunked and ignoring that this is all well covered ground just makes it seem crazy.
Have you noticed how you never have any real arguments instead what I see is "this is known for N years!" and "this is the one and only logic!"? I get it, being defied with solid technical arguments can be confusing, but please try to bear with me here instead of just defaulting the the usual non-arguments. Can you explain to me, how keeping large storage volumes synchronized over a network has no overhead and consumes no host resources please? It's a simple question, and I will not accept "magic" as an answer. Saying that pushing large amounts of data across a network comes at no cost is pretty much defying the laws of physics, so I'd like to know how exactly you expect to circumvent them.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
OK, what is the largest cluster size you can run with this starwind solution reliably? Their best practice doc is very careful about mentioning scale being a problem, although they call it "inconveniences".
Bigger than the platforms suggest to go. Starwind has no limits. Its' Vmware, KVM, Hyper-V, etc. that have the limits. Because of how Starwind works, they don't carry the single domain scaling limits in their own stuff. So anything you are looking at with any architecture would have the same or smaller limits, literally anything.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
I get it, being defied with solid technical arguments can be confusing
Fifteen years of providing those, and you are just ignoring them. I get it, but you can't just act like we've not established this all already. You aren't refuting the tech details, you are acting like they haven't been established for forever.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
I am talking about a very basic thing - storage tasks require resources. Those resources need to come from somewhere. If you don't use dedicated boxes, you have to take resources away from your VMs. It is extremely simple.
But not more resources, or meaningfully more, than the resources needed to pass that off elsewhere. And the cost of doing that has to come out of money that could be spent on local performance.
The way that you word this makes it sound reasonable, but it's not actually necessarily true.
Storage resources aren't very big in most cases, to a point where addressing them is foolish. You are literally arguing that software RAID uses a lot of resources, when since 2000, it's accepted that it doesn't. You need to provide details as to why you feel the entire industry has for two decades accepted and understood and demonstrated one thing isn't correct and that you have some secret information about how all of that is somehow wrong.
You need to show where this overhead that no one else sees is coming from. What is creating it? Why can't anyone else see it? Why are only you affected? Why is it a big deal if we can't see it or measure it? Why have all studies for twenty years showed one thing, and where is your evidence that it is all wrong?
The logic that storage overhead comes from the VMs is the same logic that mislead people about hardware RAID... those resources have to come from the CPU. That's true. But it's also the wrong way to think about performance. What matters is resulting performance of the VMs or workloads. You are getting under the hood and missing the big picture. With hardware RAID what was found is that the overhead to do it with the more powerful central CPU in essentially all cases was so low that the performance advantage went to software RAID because it was a tiny bit faster, with nominal overhead that was "spare", and in the extremely rare case that it was not, it was vastly cheaper to increase the central CPU and/or RAM capacity than it was to purchase hardware RAID for offloading.
Consider that "storage must have overhead" and "overhead must come out of the VMs" are true statements that feel like they must result in "therefore that slows the VMs down" when we know that that is not the necessary answer. It's a possible answer, but those facts aren't a complete picture and are meaningless on their own. And the industry has proven this for decades with solid math, logic, and provable observation. This isn't some crazy theory, this is IT basics as has been known across the board since the Pentium IIIS processors were released and showed it to be true and has only become more common in the decades since.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
You are assuming automated rebalance.
Automated or manually triggered - it's a costly operation.
yes, but its' a cost that has to exist regardless. So in this context, it has no extra cost.
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Funny enough, literally had to step away from this thread to work with a Fortune 10 company where we consult, about moving them to HCI. And HCI that has none of the issues that are being worried about here. Not the first Fortune 10 where I've done HC work
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Curious question...what happened to Starwind vSAN for Linux (KVM), is that not a thing anymore?
It is for sure, they talked about it at MangoCon
The Hyper-V and KVM hypervisors are no longer supported in StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance. To view the guide on installing StarWind VSA with VMware vSphere, please open the following link -
@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Curious question...what happened to Starwind vSAN for Linux (KVM), is that not a thing anymore?
It is for sure, they talked about it at MangoCon
The Hyper-V and KVM hypervisors are no longer supported in StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance. To view the guide on installing StarWind VSA with VMware vSphere, please open the following linkKVM is definitely supported, talked to management in the last twelve hours. Just not advertised.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Curious question...what happened to Starwind vSAN for Linux (KVM), is that not a thing anymore?
It is for sure, they talked about it at MangoCon
The Hyper-V and KVM hypervisors are no longer supported in StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance. To view the guide on installing StarWind VSA with VMware vSphere, please open the following linkKVM is definitely supported, talked to management in the last twelve hours. Just not advertised.
I also read that to mean they aren't supplying an appliance. The free edition still clearly lists KVM as being supported.
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@DustinB3403 said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Curious question...what happened to Starwind vSAN for Linux (KVM), is that not a thing anymore?
It is for sure, they talked about it at MangoCon
The Hyper-V and KVM hypervisors are no longer supported in StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance. To view the guide on installing StarWind VSA with VMware vSphere, please open the following linkKVM is definitely supported, talked to management in the last twelve hours. Just not advertised.
I also read that to mean they aren't supplying an appliance. The free edition still clearly lists KVM as being supported.
Yeah, the appliance is very different than the software, for sure.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
KVM is definitely supported, talked to management in the last twelve hours. Just not advertised.
Any specific reason for the non-advertisement of KVM?
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@FATeknollogee said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
KVM is definitely supported, talked to management in the last twelve hours. Just not advertised.
Any specific reason for the non-advertisement of KVM?
Not a sales priority.
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Well done to StarWind HCA! Our users on IT Central Station have given StarWind HCA an average rating of 4.9 out of 5. Here are the reviews for those interested in researching it: https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance-reviews/tzd/c981-sf-2
